Quotes About Parenting

This means that my biggest, ongoing problem as a dad is not my children, it's me.

Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don't actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God's possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose.

Parenting gets to the core of what should motivate every thought, desire, word, decision, or action that every human being has ever taken.

I think we would be shocked if we knew how many homes of parents who love to sing of God's grace on Sunday completely forget that grace as they parent their children the rest of the week. But without the intervention of God's grace, your children will not be who they are supposed to be or do what they are supposed to do.

Principle: Your children need God's law, but you cannot ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.

I propose that so much of what drives our responses to our kids is an unannounced set of laws that are more about what we want for ourselves and our lives than what God wants for and from our children. In our allegiance to our law, we end up breaking God's law in our interactions with our children. In this way we are just like our children: people who need to be rescued from ourselves.

No, the message is that God puts an uncompromising standard before us, then sends his Son to perfectly meet that standard on our behalf, so that we can be free to admit our failures and go to God for help. The cross of Jesus Christ means I don't have to deny my struggle as a parent, I don't have to act as if I'm something that I'm not, and I surely don't have to hide from the only One who is able to help me.

It means that as parents we need to daily remind ourselves that we're called to rescue our children again and again, and we should not resent those moments when that rescue is necessary.

Your children must learn early that they have been born into a world of authority, and they're not it.

Parenting is about the condition that makes good behavior seem such a hard and elusive goal.

I mean you should look every day for every opportunity to point your needy kids to the presence, promises, power, and grace of Jesus.

No one gives grace better than a parent who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself.

When a parent remarries a much younger spouse, the main dynamic that comes into play with adult children is sibling rivalry

You raise your child the best you can. You release the child into the world, like launching a toy sailboat in a pond. Except the world is not a placid pond. More often, it is a raging sea, and life a perfect storm of the unexpected crashing head-on into the unbearable. There is no way to prepare the child for such a world because your own personal crises, traumas and failures are just that, your own. Your child, as you will belatedly learn, is not you.

I'm a pretty hands-on dad and make the most of my custody. I take care of my little one whenever I can, and she determines what I can do and where I can do it.

She was doing what she was doing, not because her actions were helping her daughter—they weren't—but because she felt too uncomfortable doing nothing. Naomi accepted the fact that everything she did was based on selfish motives. She became willing to allow her daughter to take the consequences of her own behavior and thereby perhaps learn what she needed to learn.

The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.

The now-common practice by men and women to delay parenting until they are almost too old to become parents has led to numerous medical disasters. It has long been known that infertility is a problem when women delay parenting, as well as Down syndrome. Now we know children of men who delay parenting also can end up paying a medical price.

Our failure to acknowledge fathers' importance is now reflected in the shape of the American family. Fathers are disappearing. Fewer American fathers are participating in the lives of their children now than at any time since the United States began keeping records.

Children only know what you teach them.

In some cultures they don't name their babies right away. They wait until they see how the child develops. Like in Dances with Wolves. Unfortunately, our kids' names would be less romantic and poetic. "This is my oldest boy, Falls off His Tricycle, his friend, Dribbles His Juice, and my beautiful daughter, Allergic to Nuts."

And in that time, I lost my dad and had kids of my own. It was like, OK, I get it now. I know what fatherhood is all about. And you look at your parents differently.

No one under the age of eighteen needs a cell phone unless they're a surgeon, a drug dealer, or a prostitute.

While many parents worry about the effect of divorce on children, Janet R. Johnston, Ph.D., executive director of the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition, said in our interview that studies consistently find that children's exposure to unresolved conflict and verbal and physical abuse is a better predictor of children's adjustment than the marital status of their parents.