Quotes about Parenthood

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally ''being lived.'' They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.

"Who made you?" a boy of ten was asked. He stood in thoughtful silence for a moment and then, measuring the length of a baby with his hands, replied: "God made me this long, and I "growed the rest." The mistake that was his in leaving out God in his growth suggests the truth that we are partly self-made men. God and parenthood and birthplace partly make us, but we must make the rest by will and work.

We must hate - hatred is the basis of communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists.

Under the [Communications Decency Act], a parent allowing her 17 year old to use the family computer to obtain information on the Internet that she, in her parental judgment, deems appropriate could face a lengthy prison term. . . . Similarly, a parent who sent his 17 year old college freshman information on birth control via e mail could be incarcerated even though neither he, his child, nor anyone in their home community, found the material "indecent" or "patently offensive," if the college town's community thought otherwise. The breadth of this content based restriction of speech imposes an especially heavy burden on the Government to explain why a less restrictive provision would not be as effective as the CDA. It has not done so.

Infant Prodigy: a child with highly imaginative parents.

I don't know about you, but my parents are always right.

It's too bad when parents think their children can do no wrong - but it's better than thinking they can do no right.

When a parent decides to act like one of the children and begins to scream and yell at the child, all opportunity for teaching is lost.

Consideration is the parent of wisdom.

It is always preferable to visit home with a friend. Your parents will not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves and because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like mature human beings. . . .

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

No one can say the job of bringing up children is easy. There are no perfect rules which will work or are even correct for all children. All the advice given must be adjusted for the particular child and the particular parents.

It distresses parents when children who should obey them, instead imitate them.

To give the white-haired father or mother not only respect, but confidence, to tell the joke and the secret to them first, to accord them cordially the central place in the merrymaking, may seem trivial matters, yet they are not trivial to those who, in the twilight of life, begin to think they are useless or forgotten, and to question whether they shall be missed when they shall go out into the nearing night. Courtesy is but a little thing and costs nothing, and if it is due to any one, it is surely due to the aged among us, especially when these are our parents.

When parents make a practice of hurting and humiliating their children, they do permanent damage. There is a big difference between describing what you don't like or don't stand for, to a child, and your resulting to name-calling, sarcasm, and cutting remarks. Try to avoid criticism and advice about appearances and clothes. Don't say "just do as we say." Take time to listen, consider, and explain your feelings, let them decide on miner issues. Take a reasonable interest in your child's life, but you don't need to know every detail. Remember, teen-agers can't help being oversensitive to everything. Nature biologically causes a teen-ager to cast out the parents. Don't take it so hard. Appreciate their need to grow up and look outward. Don't be too shattered when all of the sudden you aren't as important any more. Get good books on teen-agers, read them, they will help you understand and may help you from making huge mistakes. When you understand where they are and they understand where you are you can meet a common ground.

Force [is] the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

The suspicious parent makes an artful child.

American parents, on the whole, do not want their sons to be artisans or craftsmen, but business or professional people. As a result, millions of youngsters are being prepared for careers they have little aptitude for - and little interest in except for dubious prestige.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

We are to remember to keep his commandments in all things, remember to search the scriptures diligently, remember the words our parents have taught us, remember the counsel of the prophets and apostles, remember the awfulness of transgression, remember that the Lord is merciful unto all who believe on his name, remember that he came to redeem us.

I think that the most important thing to teach children in an environmentally conscious age is alternative views of nature. They must be shown how our interpretation of natural systems is often completely dependent not on what is there but on what kind of box we draw around the data. And if they are going to be smarter than their parents, then schoolchildren must think subversively about accepted wisdoms concerning natural systems.

From birth to age 18, a girl needs good parents, from 18 to 35 she needs good looks, from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality, and from 55 on she needs cash.

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

The parent's job year in and year out, here a little and there a little, is to build up a disposition of good sportsmanship, of taking one's medicine, of facing the music, of being reviled and reviling not. This sense of not always being right, of recognition that perhaps we've made a mistake, seems left out of some grown-up children.

Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention.

Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our church tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us! All of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by choosing what we want to do!