Parenting Quotes

That is the flip side, you see, to laissez-faire parenting. It succeeds or not, throughout the animal kingdom as it does with humans, in direct relationship to the strength of the offspring. Some of us don’t need very much. Some of us need a lot.

~ Cynthia Rogers Parks

Children need time to become themselves--through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff--with choices and pseudochoices--before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: More!

~ Kim John Payne

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.

~ Dave Eggers

Every mom has her own battle. Win yours without being 'nyinyir' to others.

~ Jihan Davincka

This is why we can't have nice things...

~ Madge Madigan

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

~ Rebecca Solnit

At what age did I start to think that where I was going was more important than where I already was? When was it that I began to believe that the most important thing about what I was doing was getting it over with? Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them.

~ Colin Beavan

Fifteen minutes later, Betsy came thundering down the stairs. I'm going to the mall with Sierra to see a movie.Michael leaned forward, switched off the television. Can you please rephrase that in the form of a question?Sure. Can I have some money?

~ Kristin Hannah

I was delighted to see him growing more cautious and skeptical about what he heard, especially when he heard it from someone in apparent authority. I think that is fundamental to a good education. And if it comes back to bite me from time to time, that's a price worth paying.

~ Martine Millman

Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes; to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways. before they can either speak or go.

~ Thomas Traherne

Come in early, so there'll be time to pop corn,' Mrs. Ray said. If she mentioned popping corn, they always came in early. So she usually mentioned it.

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances.The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

~ Kirk Mango

There are many different ways of approaching parenting as there are cultures. However, in non-industrialized cultures, the similarities are also striking. Extended nursing, co-sleeping, carrying the baby in close physical contact, responding promptly to cries or distress, never leaving a baby alone, are all virtually universal in traditional societies that have not become overly westernized.

~ Ingrid Bauer

I should be an affected women, if I made any pretence of being surprised by my son's inspiring such emotions; but I can't be indifferent to anyone who is so sensible on his merits

~ Charles Dickens

His son's transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

~ Justin Cronin

He'd learned in the past few months that telling a girl what to wear--even one the size of a golf club--was a bad idea. Histrionics often followed.

~ Kristin Hannah

The desire to procreate, in some, is so strong that it creates a sort of tunnel vision in the afflicted. One can’t see beyond trying to make a baby, and they never stop to think about what it will really be like once said baby has in fact, arrived.

~ Karen Fowler

You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim

~ Jeannette Walls

We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do. We should set them an example that we wish them to imitate.

~ Brigham Young

I'm beginning to perceive motherhood as a long, slow letting go, of which birth is just the first step.

~ Sandra Steingraber

Perhaps I did nothing because I don't have enough fear to be a good parent.

~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

That's a parents' job, isn't it? To raise a child strong enough to leave and break our hearts?

~ Beth Groundwater

Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny. Our deepest urge is always toward life, to wholeness and well being.

~ Claire Fontaine

You can't have that wish, my Little Bear,' said Mother Bear.

~ Else Holmelund Minarik

I'm also discovering that while they seem to believe that I do not require sleep, my husband (who also doubles as their father) has the ability to morph into an invisible and supremely evasive nocturnal being, with powers so stealthy as to evade capture by the aliens [children] that had invaded our once peaceful and quiet habitat [bedroom at night].

~ Dallas Louis

She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child?

~ Scott Simon

I tell Esther she should ease up on lard. There's no need to mix lard in with Scottie's rice, chicken, and beans. I tell her she hasn't read the blogs. I've read the blogs. I know what Scottie should eat.

~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

Even though you can't control outcomes for your child, you can parent unconditionally with all your heart.

~ Lisa Coyne

Greatness, whether athletic or otherwise, doesn’t come from those content on just being but from those who seek being the difference.

~ Kirk Mango

*marissa tries to get her single, working mother's attention by suggesting something outrageous, to which mom replies:*'You're a smart girl. Use your head and avoid any guy who reminds you of your father.

~ Camille Pagán

All parents set out with expectations, hopes and dreams for their child. When a child is diagnosed with a health problem, these aspirations are altered. While one parent is hoping to see their child graduate from university, another is praying that they can live pain free

~ Sharon Dempsey

Don't even think abou

~ Jennifer Crusie

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.

~ Marian Wright Edelman

It could not have been easy for Mother, an only child, to grow up without a father and with a mother who was remote. Photos of her as a child show her extremely dressed up --Cornie's beautiful little doll. But a daughter, unlike a doll, grows up, and might fall in love with and marry someone her mother does not like; she becomes an individual with her own ideas.

~ Cornelia Maude Spelman

People who are not fully enlightened have no business becoming parents. This contradicts the conventionally accepted notion that people have an inherent right to have children. They do not. People who have a compulsion to traumatize a child, even in the mildest forms, are breaking the child's human rights, though of course the parental compulsion to find false pleasure through procreation obliterates their awareness of these rights. But interestingly, many parents would agree that convicted pedophiles and child murderers have no right to procreate, because of the dynamics in which they are so likely to engage.

~ Daniel Mackler

Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing.

~ Sinclair Lewis

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

~ Leonard Sax

A virtue is a habit that includes all of these things: actions (you take care of your child even when you don't feel like it), emotions (you are often overtaken by feelings of tenderness and delight), perceptions (you understand your little children better than they understand themselves), choices (you choose to get out of bed and go to the children's room even when you'd much rather not), and thoughts (you think differently, more thoroughly and carefully, about your children than about anyone else in the world). The habit of love includes all these things, but not necessarily all at the same time.

~ Phillip Cary

A Christian understanding of the world sees a child's character not as genetically determined but as shaped to a significant degree by parental discipleship and discipline.

~ Russell D. Moore