Quotes About Parenting

No, Engelena. Don't blame yourself. Adam and Eve had a perfect parent, yet they rebelled.

When Kate was born, she was born into a world of joy and happiness and confidence. The difference between the children is night and day. She's happy, she's thriving, she's full of self-confidence. I tell her she's beautiful every day before I send her off to school.

She had had such an unhappy childhood and she had only to picture some poor child suffering in a similar way for her heart to sink. Of course, she knew that she would never punish her child for poor academic performance. She would not comment on her child's lack of good looks either. Nor would she ever tell her son or daughter as her mother had once told her that she was only staying in a bad, destructive relationship for their sake.

Over and over and over, Mom and Dad towed them out, turned them around, then let go. The water whooshed them back to shore. The hot sun above, the cold water beneath: it was a feeling you could never get tired of.

Some moms are equipped by the hand of God to be "that mom." They have been formed with the three-C gene — Cooking, Crafting, and Cleaning come easily and naturally to them. Others of us have been delightfully chosen to provide the comic relief necessary to keep this world entertained. And to keep future therapists in business.

A FATHER'S GREATEST FEAR is usually that he won't be able to provide for his family. A mom's greatest fear is typically that something will happen to one of her children. Fear is a funny thing. It sometimes provides healthy caution, but more times than not it seems to produce undue stress and anxiety regarding things over which we have little to no control.

You are exactly the mom God knew your children needed.

God sees within me the ability to be the one He's perfectly designed to raise up this strong little person.

Don't you just love it when you're disciplining your kids and God whispers, "This is good. I hope you're listening so you can apply this same truth to your life.

But at the heart of it all we must take our noses out of textbooks and delve into the Book to gain God's perspective of raising and educating a child. We must become more concerned with their souls than their brains. A child's smarts can help them go places in life, but the character reflected from their soul is what will determine whether or not they do anything significant once they get there.

Everything in me wanted to just cross out that ridiculous 3.5-hour scheduled writing appointment and go eat fries in the midst of colored plastic tubes and screaming kids.

The moral of this story is simple. Some moms are equipped by the hand of God to be "that mom." They have been formed with the three-C gene — Cooking, Crafting, and Cleaning come easily and naturally to them. Others of us have been delightfully chosen to provide the comic relief necessary to keep this world entertained. And to keep future therapists in business.

Having babies is fun, but babies grow up into people.

The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day.

As you put your children to bed, spend at least three minutes of private time, after books and bathroom and teeth-brushing, and ask them to tell you one thing they did that they appreciate themselves for and one thing someone else did that they are thankful for. You

Our children cannot be assumed to follow in our footsteps, assuage our losses, or compensate for our inadequacies.

There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.

We need to always deal with the child in front of us, not the child of our fantasies.

Parents who have more than one child are very aware that, while we certainly have an impact on our child's development, it has as much to do with them as with us. "I can't believe how different my kids are" should inform us that child development is an uneven process only partly tied to parenting (and no one knows exactly how much that "partly" is).

Remember, our very first job is to appropriately monitor our teen's safety. After all, if we're not successful at that, then any discussion of cognitive skills is irrelevant.

It is hardly surprising that I have devoted a great deal of time and energy in my professional career to encouraging parents to be present with the child right in front of them rather than being overly focused on the future.

In this respect, I think I was an effective parent—one who understood that family time was precious, and unrecoverable—and so in my own family a lot of time was spent in family rituals and encouraging each other's particular skills and interests.

clear that she and her daughter were two separate people with very different life experiences, decide how much of her history to share with her daughter, and, finally, commit to changing her own behavior.

All of us have days when all our emotional resources are at our disposal and days when we feel depleted; we are all people in addition to being parents. Perfect is not something parents are, nor something they should strive to be. Striving for perfection is bound to end in disappointment and often in depression. We do, however, want to be the best parent we can be and we don't want to have our histories necessarily dictate our parenting skills or choices.