Parenting Quotes

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

Bill Cosby

Let your children go if you want to keep them.

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.

Bill Cosby

Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.

Benjamin Spock

The fact is that child rearing is a long, hard job, the rewards are not always immediately obvious, the work is undervalued, and parents are just as human and almost as vulnerable as their children.

Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock's Baby

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.

Nancy Chodorow

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

George Bernard Shaw

We are apt to forget that children watch examples better than they listen to preaching.

Roy L. Smith

I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

Jodi Picoult

We must return optimism to our parenting. To focus on the joys, not the hassles the love, not the disappointments the common sense, not the complexities.

Fred G. Gosman

You must not expect old heads upon young shoulders.

English Proverb

Parenting is the most important job on the planet next to keeping Gary Busey off the nation's highways.

Dennis Miller

We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves.

Henry Ward Beecher

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion-picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word collectible as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

Fran Lebowitz

For decades, parents were told by so-called parenting 'experts' that offspring would be best raised on the belief each is special and entitled to all life has to offer.

Bob Barr

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.

Leon R. Yankwich

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

Alvin Toffler

Parents can plant magic in a child's mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.

Robert Macneil

I'm hosting weekend retreats all over America. It is like a 24-hour slumber party for moms. We laugh, eat, play games, get massages, win prizes, talk about parenting and even cry a bit.

Lisa Whelchel