Quotes About Children

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.

I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.

Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity's sake, not two.

If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.

As I looked at their faces, love filled me up. It was the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too.

Plus, there were the children to consider. They were, for me, the biggest concern of all...But what if I challenged the institution? Not setting the proper and accepted religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting the circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?

One day I pulled the slender volume Children's Letters to God from a bookshelf and came upon this letter from a little girl named Sylvia: "Dear God, Are boys better than girls, I know you are one but try to be fair. Sylvia."22

My dad could go to work, he could get raises, he could be thanked for his contributions, he got a pay-check for his labor, but that didn't happen for moms. The best they could hope for would be a crayon valentine or a squashed, limp dandelion flower offered up from the damp hand of their wide-eyed and innocent child. Which wasn't nothing. In all my days I'd never considered anything to be more important than home. In a chaotic world, it was sanctuary; it was where love grew.

They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.

The children stared at him, awed and a little afraid. For a moment he was a stranger, someone they did not know. Jane had a sudden fantastic feeling that Great-Uncle Merry did not really exist at all, and would vanish away if they breathed or spoke.

The "family secret" is a further burden for abused children. By not talking about the abuse, the battered child cuts off any hope of emotional help.

Children need to make mistakes and discover that it's not the end of the world. That's how they gain the confidence to try new things in life. Toxic parents impose unobtainable goals, impossible expectations, and ever-changing rules on their children. They expect their children to respond with a degree of maturity that can come only from life experiences that are inaccessible to a child. Children are not miniature adults, but toxic parents expect them to act as if they were.

If their children misbehave, they'll take away privileges, but they won't assault their dignity or value.

Remember, accepting blame is a survival tool for abused children. They keep the myth of the good family alive by believing that they - not their parents - are bad. This belief lies at the core of virtually all self-defeating behavior patterns in adults who were abused as children.

A woman who submits to her husband's abusive treatment is living out the role of victim and behaving more like a helpless child than an adult. She relinquishes the entire adult field to her husband, leaving her children with only one grown-up to deal with: Father. As we have seen, Father can be a very scary person. When Mother abdicates her adult role, she not only deprives her children of a strong maternal figure, but she leaves them with no one to protect them from their father.

When Sandy said, "My parents don't know how to love me," she was saying that they don't know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy's parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call "love" rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behavior.

Because these parents so often behave like helpless or irresponsible children, their adult children feel protective. They jump to their parents' defense, like a crime victim apologizing for the perpetrator.

Whether it's "they didn't mean to do any harm," or "they did the best they could," these apologies obscure the fact that these parents abdicated their responsibilities to their children.

To an outsider the dinosaur is impossible to ignore, but for those within the home, the hopelessness of evicting the beast forces them to pretend it isn't there. That's the only way they can coexist. Lies, excuses, and secrets are as common as air in these homes, creating tremendous emotional chaos for children.

For hundreds of years, parental rights were considered inviolate—in the name of discipline, parents could do just about anything to their children, short of killing them.

Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.

I hate the way kids want all the attention. It's like I'm not even there when there's a baby in the room.

A lot of people think I chose these children because they have problems. That's not true. I chose these children because they touched my heart.

I'm not sure I'm the marrying kind. I don't even know if I want kids. I'm still at the keeping-a-plant alive stage of my life. Next, I'll consider getting a pet.