Parenting Quotes

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.

~ Joe Hill

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

~ Jodi Picoult

Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?

~ Richard Paul Evans

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

~ Thomas Szasz

If you're like most members of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income.

~ Dave Barry

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.

~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

~ Jane Goodall

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while.

~ Josh Billings

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

~ Jodi Picoult

We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you.

~ Jodi Picoult

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me.

~ Dave Eggers

I just want my kids to love who they are, have happy lives and find something they want to do and make peace with that. Your job as a parent is to give your kids not only the instincts and talents to survive, but help them enjoy their l

~ Susan Sarandon

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

~ Erik Erikson

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

~ Jodi Picoult

Our greatest duty to our children is to love them first.  Secondly, it is to teach them.  Not to frighten, force, or intimidate our children into submission, but to effectively teach them so that they have the knowledge and tools to govern themselves.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Before I had kids, I always found it funny how people would talk about their children like they were the cutest things on the planet and how every little thing they did was endlessly fascinating. Now that I've had kids, I can say with certainty that, my children really are the cutest things on this planet and every little thing they do is endlessly fascinating...

~ Jennifer Miller

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...

~ Ann Voskamp

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, Hey fatty-lose some weight. By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of health and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.

~ Amy Chua

Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.

~ Dan Pearce

Oftentimes I felt ridiculous giving my seal of approval to what was in reality such a natural thing to do, sort of like reinventing the wheel and extolling its virtues. Had parents' intuition sunk so low that some strange man had to tell modern women that it was okay to sleep with their babies?

~ William Sears

The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.

~ Eileen Kennedy-Moore

We do children an enormous disservice when we assume that they cannot appreciate anything beyond drive through fare and nutritionally marginal, kid-targeted convenience foods. Our children are capable of consuming something that grew in a garden or on a tree and never saw a deep fryer. They are capable of making it through diner at a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths and no climbing equipment. Children deserve quality nourishment.

~ Victoria Moran

Everything that isn't gospel is law. Let us say it again: Everything that isn't gospel is law. Every way we try to make our kids good that isn't rooted in the good news of the life, death, ressurection, and assension of Jesus Christ is damnable, crushing, despair-breeding, Pharisee-producing law. We won't get the results we want from the law. We'll get either shallow self-righteousness or blazing rebellion or both (frequently from the same kid on the same day!). We'll get moralistic kids who are cold and hypocritical and who look down on others (and could easily become Mormons), or you'll get teens who are rebellious and self-indulgent and who can't wait to get out of the house. We have to remember that in the life of our unregenerate children, the law is given for one reason only: to crush their self-confidence and drive them to Christ.

~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

~ Kate Morton

That was the tricky part. You poured inordinate amounts of time and attention and affection into your kids, but the result was indirect. You didn't point out a cat to your one-year-old and then watch him, minutes later, say 'Cat.' Instead, you pointed out a hundred cats to your one-year-old and then, one day, watched him point to a cat and say 'Mama.

~ Katherine Center

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

~ Bette Davis

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The one encouragement we can always give our children (and one another) is that God is more powerful than our sin, and He's strong enough to make us want to do the right thing.

~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-for its own sake rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.

~ Wendy Mogel

Raising kids is part joy and part guerilla warfare.

~ Ed Asner

The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time.

~ Russell D. Moore

The miracle of children is that we just don’t know how they will change or who they will become.

~ Eileen Kennedy-Moore

Teaching our children to live a quiet, sane, and balanced life is one of the most important parental tasks of our day.

~ Brent L. Top

Child give me your hand so that I may walk in the light of your faith in me.

~ Hannah Kahn

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, son might turn out to be a killer would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H

~ Lionel Shriver

The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

~ Madeleine L'engle

The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch.

~ Karen Maezen Miller