Parenting is a journey filled with countless moments of joy, challenge, and growth. Sometimes, a few thoughtful words can provide the encouragement and perspective needed to navigate those ups and downs. In this collection, we bring you 108 inspiring parenting quotes that celebrate the beauty, strength, and dedication involved in raising children. Whether you’re a new parent or have years of experience, these quotes offer wisdom and motivation to help you embrace every step along the way.
1. “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” - Emilie Buchwald
2. “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
3. “Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility in a wife for the sole reason that the offspring must be supported and brought up. For this is what they commonly say: ‘Why should I marry a wife when I am a pauper and a beggar? I would rather bear the burden of poverty alone and not load myself with misery and want.’ But this blame is unjustly fastened on marriage and fruitfulness. Indeed, you are indicting your unbelief by distrusting God’s goodness, and you are bringing greater misery upon yourself by disparaging God’s blessing. For if you had trust in God’s grace and promises, you would undoubtedly be supported. But because you do not hope in the Lord, you will never prosper.” - Martin Luther
4. “When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911. ” - Erma Bombeck
5. “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.” - Barbara Kingsolver
6. “He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.” - Cormac McCarthy
7. “we can learn to trust our maternal selves and to have faith in the innate goodness and purity of our children - even when we feel overwhelmed and the kids are pushing all our buttons. we can support one another....we can be understanding of each other and easier on ourselves.” - Katrina Kenison
8. “One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.” - Mark Twain
9. “Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.” - Haruki Murakami
10. “One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.” - Anne Fadiman
11. “We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.” - Madeleine L'Engle
12. “My kid, her life. I want for her what she wants for herself.” - Laura Castoro
13. “I would have made a terrible parent. The first time my child didn't do what I wanted, I'd kill him.” - Katherine Hepburn
14. “Sometimes, kids want you to hurt the way they hurt.” - Mitch Albom
15. “It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows” - Erma Bombeck
16. “My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser” - Diana Gabaldon
17. “How is it possible that our parents lied to us?""Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy,the Easter bunny,um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like that...""Everythings going to be alright.” - Brian K. Vaughan
18. “Your children are not your children.They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.” - Kahlil Gibran
19. “Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.” - Louise Erdrich
20. “What it's like to be a parent: It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.” - Nicholas Sparks
21. “When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.” - Greg Mortenson
22. “I gave you life. You’re wasting it.” - Stephenie Meyer
23. “There are a hundred ways in which a boy can injure—if not indeed kill—himself. The more adventurous he is and the greater his initiative, the more ways he will find. If you protect him from each of the first hundred, he is sure to find the hundred and first. Though most men can look back on their boyhood and tremble at the narrowness of some of their escapes, most boys do in fact survive more or less intact, and the wise father is the trusting father.” - Christopher Milne
24. “Sebutir benih yang bertunas di bawah kaki pohon induknya tetap berada di situ sampai ia dipindahkan..Setiap manusia, kalau sudah tiba saatnya, harus pergi dan mewujudkan potensi masing-masing dengan caranya sendiri. [Ramayana-Mahabharata, hal. 28]” - R.K. Narayan
25. “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
26. “What do we say to a guest who forgets her umbrella? Do we run after her and say "What is the matter with you? Every time you come to visit you forget something. If it's not one thing it's another. Why can't you be like your sister? When she comes to visit, she knows how to behave. You're forty-four years old! Will you never learn? I'm not a slave to pick up after you! I bet you'd forget your head if it weren't attached to your shoulders." That's not what we say to a guest. We say "Here's your umbrella, Alice," without adding "scatterbrain." Parents need to learn to respond to their children as they do to guests.” - Haim G. Ginott
27. “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
28. “No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you've got, say "Oh, my gosh," and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It's not a question of choice.” - Marisa de los Santos
29. “Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing when parents make from their children's souls paralytics.” - Simon Soloveychik
30. “Responsible parenting is NOT a crime. Responsible parenting is most valuable tool of our society.” - Mick Karabegovic
31. “Parenthood...It's about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.” - Peter Krause (Parenthood)
32. “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.” - Oscar Wilde
33. “If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.” - Charles H. Spurgeon
34. “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.” - Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend
35. “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
36. “One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.” - Jane Goodall
37. “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
38. “The more you test him, the slower he will learn and the less he'll want to do. The less you test him, the quicker he will learn and the more he'll want to learn. Knowledge is the most precious gift you can give your child. Give it as generously as you give him food.” - Glenn Doman
39. “Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.” - Robert A. Heinlein
40. “We all know that parents do not make children but that children make parents…Authentic parenting is one long sacrificial act…parenting reveals the way that sacrifice at once diminishes our life as we knew it…while at the same time revealing to us larger and infinitely more fascinating forms of life…Parents know experientially that the very process which makes them suffer also makes them grow.” - Luke Timothy Johnson
41. “I raised my three teens with love, perseverance, tenacity, sweat, tears, prayers, lighting candles, and the list could go on.” - Ana Monnar
42. “If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.” - John Holt
43. “The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child, but the parent.” - Frank Pittman
44. “There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.” - Michael Chabon
45. “God is at work telling a story of restoration and redemption through your family. Never buy into the myth that you need to become the "right" kind of parent before God can use you in your children's lives. Instead learn to cooperate with whatever God desires to do in your heart today so your children will have a front-row seat to the grace and goodness of God.” - Reggie Joiner
46. “It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.” - Joyce Maynard
47. “In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard. A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. Children need to be raised in loving environments. Whenever domination is present love is lacking. Loving parents, be they single or coupled, gay or straight, headed by females or males, are more likely to raise healthy, happy children with sound self-esteem. In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love” - bell hooks
48. “On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time.” - Rachel Gathercole
49. “When our feet talk to us, we listen.” - Alexander Nestoiter
50. “Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.” - Lisa Unger
51. “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
52. “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
53. “We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.” - Henry Ward Beecher
54. “If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.” - Bette Davis
55. “It's not politically correct to say that you love one child more than you love your others. I love all of my kids, period, and they're all your favorites in different ways. But ask any parent who's been through some kind of crisis surrounding a child--a health scare, an academic snarl, an emotional problem--and we will tell you the truth. When something upends the equilibrium--when one child needs you more than the others--that imbalance becomes a black hole. You may never admit it out loud, but the one you love the most is the one who needs you more desperately than his siblings. What we really hope is that each child gets a turn. That we have deep enough reserves to be there for each of them, at different times.All this goes to hell when two of your children are pitted against each other, and both of them want you on their side.” - Jodi Picoult
56. “While I was drying off Maddie after her bath tonight, she said, 'I love you' to me for the first time. It sounded like 'All lub boo,' but I didn't care. To reciprocate, I showed her what an ex-Marine looks like when he cries.” - Jim Beaver
57. “It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.” - Anne Lamott
58. “But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once.” - Youngme Moon
59. “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
60. “The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.” - Kristen Crockett
61. “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
62. “We know – it has been measured in many experiments – that children with strong impulse control grow to be better adjusted, more dependable, achieve higher grades in school and college and have more success in their careers than others. Success depends on the ability to delay gratification, which is precisely what a consumerist culture undermines. At every stage, the emphasis is on the instant gratification of instinct. In the words of the pop group Queen, “I want it all and I want it now.” A whole culture is being infantilised.” - Jonathan Sacks
63. “Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well.... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child.” - Lisa Coyne
64. “Even though you can't control outcomes for your child, you can parent unconditionally with all your heart.” - Lisa Coyne
65. “... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...” - Ann Voskamp
66. “It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent.” - John Stuart Mill
67. “Parents can tell but never teach, unless they practice what they preach.” - Arnold H. Glasow
68. “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
69. “The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.” - Madeleine L'Engle
70. “What doesn't kill you will make you stronger” - Jeannette Walls
71. “Jumping, waving arms, cheering, laughing, head-butting him in the groin, an unfortunate ritual in the Tanner home, very much unappreciated by Jim, but tolerated for the sake of the children, Grace, Bobby and Steven joined Jason next to their father.” - Mike Jackson
72. “We parents are an extension of our children, not the other way around. We are their conscience until it becomes their responsibility to tell themselves what’s right and necessary. We are their butlers until they are fully able to get the items they need and can clean up after themselves. We are their cheerleaders until they learn how to develop their own confidence and motivation. We are their counselors until they are able to take the lead in making the tough decisions that affect them.” - Larry Tanner
73. “Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.” - Tom Robbins
74. “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
75. “Parenthood doesn’t improve one’s character, it exposes it.” - Leslie A. Gordon
76. “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. Hassle.2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.)3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.)6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.)7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.)9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.)10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)” - Lionel Shriver
77. “With a lump forming in his throat, he thoughtabout all the hopes and dreams that he had for his son. More thananything, he prayed his boy would not grow up to be a screw uplike his dad when it came to love and marriage.” - Michelle Sutton
78. “Science and discovery, especially in the field of non-abnormal pediatric mysteries, is built on the work of those who have been sneezed on before us. Causation and rationale may someday be reached, but until then it is the heartwarming and parental nature of the journey that drives us on; well, that and a fresh box of Kleenex.” - Spuds Crawford
79. “So, your best defense is knowledge. It really is power, as they say...The more you know, the more easily you will develop your own philosophies about child rearing. When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice.” - Elizabeth Pantley
80. “A dam doesn't try to reason with the water. Its main purpose is to hold it still for a while. When I lecture my kids I'm doing much the same thing. I'm not trying to necessarily reason with them, just hold them still for a short while.” - Spuds Crawford
81. “As a young father it's important to remember that, when you're at the beach, there's a BIG difference between telling your five year old son to just go pee in the ocean and telling him to get in the water at least waist deep and then pee in the ocean.” - Spuds Crawford
82. “Perhaps I did nothing because I don't have enough fear to be a good parent.” - Kaui Hart Hemmings
83. “Instead of communicating "I love you, so let me make life easy for you," I decided that my message needed to be something more along these lines: "I love you. I believe in you. I know what you're capable of. So I'm going to make you work.” - Kay Wills Wyma
84. “You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.” - Jonathan Franzen
85. “I complained to a friend that although I had completed six years in therapy, my mother still wouldn’t let me go. He replied, "She’s not supposed to let you go. Your father is supposed to come and get you.” - Don Elium
86. “Quality time is not the same as the everydayness of being together. Let’s neither glorify nor undervalue.” - Don Elium
87. “My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.” - James McBride
88. “I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ's love."...make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believe it is God's will for me to serve my family through them.” - Sally Clarkson
89. “I figure when my husband comes home from work, if the kids are still alive, then I've done my job.” - Roseanne Barr
90. “When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.” - Robert Penn Warren
91. “It's a fathers job to spoil his daughters shamelessly, it's their husbands job to tame them. Prince Zehava-The Dragon Prince” - Melanie Rawn
92. “The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.” - Robert Trivers
93. “I had been running as fast as I could for all of my adult life. A person can’t listen effectively while running. A running mother is not able to pick up clues. She is not able to let go of her own agenda long enough to stop and listen.” - Irene Tomkinson
94. “Discipling our children is not about teaching them to behave in a way that won’t embarrass us. We’re working toward something much more important than that. We’re actually raising our children with a view toward leading them to trust and to follow Christ.” - Voddie T. Baucham Jr.
95. “The greatest source of security our children have in this world is a God-honoring, Christ-centered marriage between their parents.” - Voddie T. Baucham Jr.
96. “Mr Cobb would acquaint him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party.” - Charles Dickens
97. “If you can pick the baby up without him squirting our of your hands like a bar of soap in the shower, he's not oiled up enough.” - James Lileks
98. “If Mother had to be told not to shove the entire brick of Ivory up Junior's hindquarters, constipation is the least of his problems.” - James Lileks
99. “Often people ask, "How can you say you're blessed to have a son with Down syndrome?" My outlook on life has forever changed. I see my own challenges differently. He's always showing me that life is so much bigger than self.” - Yvonne Pierre
100. “Unconditional parental love is the indespensible nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love - in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost...The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love.” - Gordon Neufeld
101. “Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.” - Salman Rushdie
102. “My heart filled with Nick's smile, with the look of sheer adoration he gave me as he lugged the bucket. In the space of an instant, I felt it again—the crumbling of an old part of me, the growth of something new. The changing of my heart into a mother's heart. It happened at the strangest times, in the most unexpected ways. Nick looked at me, and the love I felt for him was almost painful in its intensity. I'd never known I had it in me, the capacity to love this way. ... But when Nick looked at me, my mind tumbled through nights and mornings, seasons and years in the future. ... I saw a future like none I'd ever imagined. I wanted it, every minute of it.” - Lisa Wingate
103. “A yummy mummy is a dedicated and loving mom who embodies a healthy lifestyle while retaining a sense of the person she was before having kids.” - Marina Delio
104. “When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.” - Sheryl Sandberg
105. “I think . . . you should have children, John." At least he's no longer talking about bugs."I'm too young, Dad.""It's the most important thing . . . I've done in . . . my life.” - Ursula Hegi
106. “It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.” - L.R. Knost
107. “[I]f we can bring our children understanding, comfort, and hopefulness when they need this kind of support, then they are more likely to grow into adults who can find these resources within themselves later on. (from the introduction)” - Fred Rogers
108. “We must imbue our children with principles of the higher-self, principles which see all people as true equals, and above all, which are sensitive to the delicate and fragile balance of life.” - Bryant McGill
