Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Parenting.
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
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.
I came to parenting the way most of us do - knowing nothing and trying to learn everything.
Mayim Bialik
Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.
Terry Pratchett
Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
Erica Jong
Parenting is not for sissies. You have to sacrifice and grow up.
Jillian Michaels
Love well, whip well.
Benjamin Franklin
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Thomas Carlyle
Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or ... the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child's frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child's character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions - one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done - unpleasantly - to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all...
Karl Menninger, The Crime of Pun
Granted there are instances in which children have been reared in an atmosphere of inconsistency where value training of any kind was entirely missing; but even in these cases, it is the lack of loving guidance and structure rather than the lack of punitive retribution that has triggered the behavioral manifestations of delinquency. In a high percentage of court cases, there is evidence that the child has met with punishment that has not only been frequent but in many cases excessive. In fact, one of the sources of the child's own inadequate development is the model of open violence provided by the parent who has resorted repeatedly to corporal punishment, usually because of his own limited imagination. This indoctrination into a world where only might makes right and where all strength is invested in the authority of the mother or of the father not only makes it easy for the child to develop aggressive patterns of behavior but makes him emotionally distant and distrustful.
Sydney Smith, quoted by by Karl
The Golden Rule of Parenting is do unto your children as you wish your parents had done unto you!
Louise Hart
I'm a parent, especially when you've had the intense parenting the way I had. It's all in the bank. It's all in the great experience bank. Those are your secrets. That's the stuff that makes your work rich, that's what you dip into.
Hector Elizondo
A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.
Frank A. Clark
The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.
Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.
Garrison Keillor
A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.
Billy Graham
The first and finest lesson that parents can teach their children is faith and courage.
Smiley Blanton
Believe me, my children have more stamina than a power station.
Robbie Coltrane
The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter.
Meryl Streep
Relationships are complicated no matter what style of parenting you choose.
