Quotes About Parenting

Rosie appreciated the support but wasn't sure parenting ever really qualified as brave—or maybe it always did—because it's not like you had a choice.

When a little girl wants to wear jeans and play soccer, her parents are thrilled, but when a little boy wants to wear a dress and play dolls, his parents send him to therapy.

It's irritating when people tell you that you're such good parents you're failing your kid.

She knew that what came out of kids was often terrifying, but its coming out, rather than staying inside, was the happy ending.

Daughters go into analysis hating their fathers and come out hating their mothers. They never come out hating themselves.

There are things running around out there with uteruses,son. You're going to need this.

It's a well-known fact that black sheep should never have lambs. You know what you get when you take a black sheep and give it a lamb? You get a thing called "supervised visitation" that's what.

As soon as Nicholas was born, my mother swore she'd rather see her daughters become Jehovah's Witnesses or pole dancers before she saw her first grandchild in daycare when my sister went back to work. I don't think it was originally the idea of daycare that didn't sit well with her but the fact that there, in a bassinet, was a fresh slate, a lump of clay that could be worked on and molded into the perfect child who had eluded her the first time around with her own daughters.

Love your children with all your hearts, love them enough to discipline them before it is too late. ... Praise them for important things, even if you have to stretch them a bit. Praise them a lot. They live on it like bread and butter and they need it more than bread and butter.

child never allowed to give would surely become a self-indulgent adult, his happiness dependent upon whatever was put into his outstretched palm.

My wife was out and I was home alone with Emma when my mother called. She said, "Oh, so you're babysitting?" As politely as I could manage, I answered, "I call it fathering." She realized immediately what she had said and apologized. I realized that when she was a child, and again as a mother of young children, father's active involvement with their infants was so minimal that it could fairly be called baby-sitting.

Plus, we adults have unhealed hurts from our own childhoods, which sometimes get in the way right when our children need our support. Our own piles of old feelings interfere with parenting playfully. In turn, that makes it hard to help children with their emotional difficulties

Using Playful Parenting, we can help children release all this emotion in ways that aren't hurtful to others. We do this by just spending lots of time giggling together, but also with some specific techniques. To help children with fears, for example, it often helps to play as if you are the one who is scared, and really exaggerate it. Make sure they don't feel mocked or humiliated. It helps if you don't imitate them exactly, but just take the general idea and exaggerate it.

The most common response by parents to children's isolation is aggravation or worry. We may focus on the annoying behavior, not seeing the pain underneath, or we see the pain all too clearly and feel helpless to fix it. These are difficult moments for any parent. What we need are keys to unlock the door to that fortress of isolation and help the child out again into the fields of play. Playful Parenting provides those keys.

Tuning in does not mean questioning our children about every little detail of their lives. Instead, tell an interesting story from your day; they might respond with a story of their own.

Others of us may be unable to put aside our competitiveness or our need to be in control. We get bored, cranky, and frustrated; we're sore losers; we worry about teaching how to throw the ball correctly when our child just wants to play catch.

Maybe we swore we would never be harsh with our children the way others were harsh with us. Then, just when they need us most - when they act up and misbehave and call us names and son on - we get angry and punish them, or feel hurt and block them out. We momentarily forget how fragile our little ones are, just as they forget about cooperation or sharing or calming down and following the rules.

In the words of John Updike, who often writes about the alienation of husbands and fathers, "If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money." Obviously Updike was making an understatement; fathering takes more than just being on speaking terms with our children.

One time the wife asked everyone if they wanted lemonade, and after she went in to make it, one of the children said to her husband, "Your mom is really nice." Nonparents, even if they are recognized as being adults, can be accepted as "one of the gang" in a way that parents generally can't. And children benefit from a thoughtful, respectful adult who can be seen as an ally rather than as the enemy.

To feel forever inadequate: Is this simply the universal condition of being a father?

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

But now, being a parent, I go home and see my son and I forget about any mistake I ever made or the reason I'm upset. I get home and my son is smiling or he comes running to me. It has just made me grow as an individual and grow as a man.

And those deadbeat fathers weren't supporting their kids, either." Her mom had terrible taste in men, and poor judgment, and was the maker of most of her own troubles, but Eve wasn't going to concede a thing to this man. For the sake of this discussion, her mom was a saint.

feeling her tiny hand in his somehow made him feel stronger, that he could take on anything if that's what it took to keep her safe. With just that touch, his own life took second place to hers.