Quotes About Parenting

Major offenses like this one, as well as minor indignities, or what psychologist Chester Pierce (1995) referred to as micro-aggressions, are so common and pervasive that for many parents, preparing their Black sons for the likelihood of an

Se van marchando. Un día se marchan los siete años, pum. Otro día se marchan los coho, pum. Otro día se van los nueve, pum. Y después no los busque por ninguna parte, porque, si los encuentra, seguro que ya no son sus hijos. Sino parecidos. Con sus apellidos. Con algunos gestos de entonces, eso sí. [...] Se han ido y ya no vuelven. Y tú entonces te dices dónde leñes has estado mirando y qué has estado haciendo todo este tiempo.

As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a "persona" for her parents but doesn't learn to know herself. What happens is that "the authentic self"--the part of us open to feelings, experinces, and intimicy--remains underdeveloped.

The parent of a child, as Deborah Tannen has written, has the power not only to create the world the child lives in but the ability to dictate how that world is to be interpreted. Seen from that point of view, one of the lasting and important legacies of a mean mother is a wellspring of self-doubt. The other, explained by adaptive behavior, is a need to replicate the relationship she has to her mother with other people, regardless of how unhappy it makes her.

Kelli Farrell talks about the difference between girls and boys who struggle to get through high school: "Girls, especially those whose moms are head of household, get the message that men come and go, that they're going to have to take care of themselves and their kids. They're ready for the opportunity to step up. By the last year or two in high school, many boys have already steeled themselves for failure. They've checked out intellectually, mentally, and emotionally.

Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.

Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times. Demonstrate that people can be trusted, that the environment can be trusted, that we live in a benign universe.

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.

Hitting is never the best way to teach a child. Even in the case of real danger - as when a child runs out into the road - you can grab him, sit him down, look him in the eyes, and tell him why he must never do that again. The panic in your voice will communicate your message much more effectively than any spanking. You can be dramatic without being abusive.

Effective discipline is based on loving guidance. It is based on the belief that children are born innately good and that our role as parents is to nurture their spirits as they learn about limits and boundaries, rather than to curb their tendencies toward wrongdoing. Effective discipline presumes that children have reasons for their behavior and that cooperation can be engaged to solve shared problems.

chose to love my friends. I chose to love my wife. I think I even chose to love my parents as I got older. But I had no say in loving my children. The love for my children is beyond my control. It's animal. It's like hunger. It's more than hunger—there have been times I could control my hunger (although I can't remember any off the top of my head). I love my children like I need to breathe.

Children were vulnerable—helpless hostages to fate, their emotions so tender that a parent could with the smallest sentence, the briefest gesture, accidentally scar them. He did not want the burden of carrying that responsibility.

In short, I don't need a man to take care of me, but I want one. I want you. I want you for my husband and a father for the two children I have and for any that we might have.

psychiatrists would eventually decide that most mental disorders were caused by faulty chemistry in the brain, not bad parenting, bad morals, or horrible childhoods.

If an adult does not protest when a child is being attacked with destructive criticism, she is in an unspoken alliance with the critic. The child is forced to assume contempt is normal and acceptable. The witnessing adult has forsaken her/his tribal responsibility to protect the child from parents who perpetrate child abuse.

Children who receive good enough parenting easily recognize and protect themselves from bullying and exploitive people because they do not have to become accustomed to being treated unfairly.

Chronic emotional abandonment devastates a child. It naturally makes her feel and appear deadened and depressed. Functional parents respond to a child's depression with concern and comfort. Abandoning parents respond to the child with anger, disgust and/or further abandonment, which in turn exacerbate the fear, shame and despair that become the abandonment mélange.

grieving the losses of childhood, and understanding how abusive and negligent parenting is at the root of our problems.

We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves. We can redirect this blame to our parents' dreadful child-rearing practices. And we can also do this in a way that motivates us to reject their influence so that we can freely orchestrate our journey of recovering.

As I am writing this, my son's friend synchronistically tells him: "This Lego creature I made spreads brain attack and eats away at the person." I marvel at this synchronicity and think: "What a fitting image for the trauma-inducing parent".

El primero, nuestros padres a menudo nos educaron de maneras que replicaron ciegamente la manera en que ellos fueron educados. Y segundo, a menudo fueron apoyados en su educación disfuncional por las normas y valores sociales de sus tiempos.

Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent's warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that gnaws deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human warmth and comfort.

Scapegoating is often a reenactment of a parent's abusive role. It is blind imitation of a parent who habitually released his frustration by indiscriminately raging. When a fight type parent scapegoats those around him, he enforces a perverse kind of mirroring. He is making sure that when he feels bad, so does everyone else. It is like a bumper sticker I saw the other day: "If Momma ain't happy, Nobody's happy.

We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves.