Quotes About Parenting

Kids make everything better. And harder.

chauffeur of three, including a precocious, independent-minded teenage boy.

dream. Her old man was proud of her, Gibson knew, though he rarely showed it. Public displays of affection were not in the DNA of the Rogers family. Gibson could count on one hand the number of times her mother had hugged or kissed her. And she could count

There's a chromosome that goes haywire when you turn thirteen. It commands you to live in filth while withstanding all threats by parents to clean up your act.

It goes by so fast. But when your kids are little and the days seem like they are forty-eight hours long, you just can't see that. And everyone with grown kids tells you they grow up in the blink of an eye and will be out of college and on with their lives before you know it. And young parents listen but never really believe it.' She paused. 'Until it happens to them.

Sooner or later, the realization arrives: the child discovers the immaturity of the parent, and the parent the maturity of his child.

Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.

Your essential emotional tone—at ease in your deepest purpose or fearful in the ambiguity of your intent—becomes part of your children's home.

A short period of time with a father who is absolutely present, full in love, undivided inside, and sure of his mission in life, will affect your children much more positively than if they spend lots of time with a father who is ambiguous in his intent and has lost touch with his deepest purpose, no matter how much he loves his children.

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they'd told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt's complete absence. They have forgotten.

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children's need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child's desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn't a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of

No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out.

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child

Jeremiah lived about three hundred years ago. He had only one son, whom he educated himself in his own house. As they were sitting together in the garden when the child was ten years old, Jeremiah began talking to him. He said: The little time that you have been in the world, my child, you have spent entirely with me. My love and tenderness to you has made you look upon me as your only friend and benefactor, and the cause of all the comfort and pleasure that you enjoy. Your heart

What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners…I want my children to be people– each one separate– each one special– each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!

The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.

For your sake, jewel, I am glad at soul I have no other child; For thy escape would teach me tyranny, To hang clogs on them.

It is a wise father who knows his own child.

7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

24 He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes

Raised by two mothers...wow, most of us barely survive one

One of the saddest things of my life was that I was deprived of the years of raising Dylan and could only dream about showing her Manhattan and the joys of Paris and Rome.

Then comes the stiff, unnatural awkward mess of a supervised visit. Meaning that instead of a father and son spending some nice time doing something together, there's always a third person right there to be sure I don't rape the poor kid.