Quotes About Parenting

Until the age of nine, a child doesn't need choices. Having too many choices pushes a child to grow up too soon. One of the greatest sources of stress for adults today is too many choices. Directly asking a young child what she wants puts too much pressure on the child. Always asking children what they want or how they feel weakens a parent's ability to maintain control.

She could not imagine finding the patience to raise kids in the age of cell phones, drugs, casual sex, social media, and everything else on the Internet.

Well, in my defense, I was walking the floor at three this morning with her latest child. I think it's a girl. What's her name?

She had not raised her daughter to live such a life; in fact, Debbie had been raised in the church. After high school, though, she began partying and keeping later hours.

If he neglected Seth as an adult, it was because Seth had neglected him as a little boy. A child is not born with the tendency to neglect; it has to be acquired. Herschel learned from a master.

was she following her parents' examples?

They agreed to go their separate ways on Sundays and had no idea what would happen when children entered the picture.

We both rolled our eyes when my old-school mother clucked at us, Enjoy them while you can because they'll be grown up before you know it. Now, even just a few years into it, we were realising she was right. Hers was a well-worn cliché but one we could already see was steeped in truth. The boys were growing up fast, and each week ended another little chapter that could never again be revisited.

I figli sono come orologi che non si possono ignorare; segnano l'inesorabile marcia della vita attraverso quello che altrimenti sembrerebbe un infinito are di minuti, ore, giorni, e anni.

Every evening my wife makes us martinis and we talk about our days as I cook dinner and our children ignore us. It is a great pleasure in our lives: this rediscovering of each other as our children age. It is our indulgence.

As a father now myself, it's sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children's lives, with some leaving permanent warps. I must console myself in the certainty that I am helping them and damaging them in other ways I cannot see.

One can scarcely conceive the full horror of it unless one is a parent who takes a close look at his children and then asks himself how he would feel if a group of men should come to his door and tell him they had decided - for reasons of convenience to them - that his children's lives would henceforth be restricted, their world smaller, their educational opportunities less, their future mutilated

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

Of course, I was not yet born when my mother told her parents she was pregnant

You can see why we children asked so many questions. It is a vague story, the kind parents prefer to tell.

Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from one's vision what correct behavior is.

Consciously or not, all parents act in ways that encourage their children to follow in their footsteps.

Oh my God! You're wearing your bowling shoes! Only you would wear bowling shoes to your child's sickbed.

People are just uptight because the kids are having fun. They didn't have the same freedom because they didn't take it; they just followed the lives laid down by their parents. And they're jealous of the people who didn't do that.