Quotes About Parenting

No vaginas at the dinner table!" Dad said.

I often get a particular wrinkled-nose look from Mom: mild revulsion mixed with fondness, as if she can't quite believe she made me, this large, sometimes stinky, always untidy boy who double dips and chugs orange juice out of the carton even though she begs me not to.

Having a child does not change you so much as amplify whatever is unresolved.

Not once has the instructor talked about parenting after the baby is born. Instead, we fetishize labor. We focus on it to the exclusion of each other, our children, our futures. Is this because it can be taught, and parenting can't? Because, Americans to the bitter end, we love a sport, grow bored by things more subtle?

Our children are not ours because we have given them our genes. They are ours because we have had the audacity to envision them.

Mom and Dad were great, but being asked where I was going every time I left the house - or where I'd been every time I returned - got old quickly.

Children become triangulated with warring parents. Within the family system the children are used as pawns in the struggle between the mother and father, and in divorce the children are often forced to take sides. By having to choose between one parent or the other, they are forced into a situation where they are asked to betray one part of their heart or the other.

Attuned parents support increasing age-appropriate independence and autonomy. Highly anxious parents undermine their children's developing need for independence because of their own unresolved fears. They prevent their age-appropriate movement toward autonomy in order to "protect" their children.

Called upon to give her baby what she never received herself, this mother may be conflicted about giving, unconsciously wanting her baby to give her the love and nurturing she never received.

From 9 months on, either spouse can buy the farm and the other will be eligible for survivor benefits, as well as mother or father benefits if there are children, and the children themselves—whether premarital, newborn, adopted, or from previous relationships—will be eligible for child survivor benefits.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.

The educating of the parents is really the education of the child children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves.

The parental units take no notice of me as I make my leave. They are too busy having a discussion.

These are your children, and like it or not, they are your responsibility. I presume you got these infants on my sister like a man, and if you want to walk and piss like a man, you can damn well learn to take care of your family like a man, too!

I'll tell you a secret. A lot of times, parents are not the best at seeing their children clearly.

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be,

They had assumed this photography thing was an adolescent phase, like boy chasing, or vegetarianism. What else had they worked so hard for all these years? For Mia to throw their money away on art school?

She remembered then that Lexie, thank god, had stayed over at Serena Wong's house last night.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin.

Mia was affectionate but never effusive; Pearl had never seen her mother embrace anyone other than her.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for existed all at once.

Succulents would grow anew from a broken-off leaf, pushing roots out into the air, then down into the soil: a piece of its own body, transformed into its child.