Parenting is a journey filled with immeasurable joy, profound challenges, and countless learning experiences. Along this path, parents often seek wisdom, reassurance, and inspiration to guide them through the ups and downs. Whether you're a new parent navigating the early years or a seasoned guardian facing the trials of adolescence, finding the right words can offer comfort and perspective. In this carefully curated collection of 110 inspiring parenting quotes, you'll find insights from renowned figures, touching sentiments from fellow parents, and timeless advice that speaks to the heart of parenthood. Let these quotes serve as a source of encouragement and a reminder of the incredible role you play in nurturing the next generation.
1. “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt
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. “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” - Franklin P. Adams
4. “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?” - Jane Nelsen
5. “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” - Benjamin Franklin
6. “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
7. “If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support. ” - Osho
8. “...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.” - Louisa May Alcott
9. “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
10. “If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding...and snatch an opportunity to shape character.” - Jane Clayson Johnson
11. “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
12. “Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street. ” - Neil Gaiman
13. “The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.” - Dorothy Parker
14. “Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.” - Scott Dikkers
15. “We want our children to become who they are--- and a developed person is, above all, free. But freedom as we define it doesn't mean doing what you want. Freedom means the ability to make choices that are good for you. It is the power to choose to become what you are capable of becoming, to develop your unique potential by making choices that turn possibility into reality. It is the ability to make choices that actualize you. As often as not, maybe more often than not, this kind of freedom means doing what you do not want, doing what is uncomfortable or tiring or boring or annoying.” - Gregory Millman
16. “It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows” - Erma Bombeck
17. “The newborn has only three demands. They are warmth in the arms of its mother, food from her breasts, and security in the knowledge of her presence. Breatfeeding satisfies all three.” - Grantly Dick-Read
18. “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
19. “Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times. Demonstrate that people can be trusted, that the environment can be trusted, that we live in a benign universe.” - Peggy O'Mara
20. “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
21. “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
22. “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
23. “We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.” - Phyllis Diller
24. “We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?” - Jodi Picoult
25. “The most insidious of the premature responsibilities that may be foisted onto some children is the expectation that the child is somehow supposed to take care of his parents, rather than the other way around. Parents who were themselves raised with too little attention given to their own early feelings, if they have not worked out the resulting emotional problems in subsequent years, often look forward to having children of their own so that the children will make them happy. (81)” - Sheldon B. Kopp
26. “Responsible parenting is NOT a crime. Responsible parenting is most valuable tool of our society.” - Mick Karabegovic
27. “Parenthood...It's about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.” - Peter Krause (Parenthood)
28. “I don't understand why some kids git a good school and mother and father and some don't. But Rita say forgit the WHY ME shit and git on to what's next.” - Sapphire
29. “We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you.” - Jodi Picoult
30. “It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T.” - Anne Lamott
31. “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.” - Oscar Wilde
32. “We're [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we're just praying we won't screw up too badly.” - Jodi Picoult
33. “The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.” - Richard Louv
34. “Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do.” - Ben Fountain
35. “There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.” - Marianne Williamson
36. “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
37. “The irreducible, ultimate element in religious faith is the insistence that we are created things; male and female He created them; without God we are nothing. And yet, when men and women have children and become parents, they unmistakably become creators, incompetent, accidental and partial creators, no doubt, but creators none the less. It is their inescapable duty, and, with luck, their occasional delight to care and watch over their creations; even if this creative power is partly illusory because chromosomes and chance decide the whole business, parents cannot act as if it is illusory; they cannot sincerely believe in their ultimate helplessness. They must behave like shepherds, however clumsy, and not like sheep, however well trained.The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon. But it is a sermon for bachelors.” - Ferdinand Mount
38. “I'm so cool that the kids come to my bedroom and go, 'Mom! Turn the music down!” - Melissa Etheridge
39. “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.” - Plato
40. “Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite, Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.” - Tina Fey
41. “[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.” - Michael Chabon
42. “I'll show up at every classroom open house and teacher conference,' she said, now in a voice that was almost frightening in its intensity. 'I'll bake brownies. My child will have new clothes. Her shoes will fit. She'll get her shots, and she'll get her braces. We'll start a college fund next week. I'll tell her I love her every damn day.'If that wasn't a great plan for being a good mother, I couldn't imagine what a better one could be.” - Charlaine Harris
43. “The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following:1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog.2. The terrible twos last through age three.3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as "Do you want to go to bed now?" You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. "Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed?" That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.” - Jodi Picoult
44. “Even if i'm setting myself up for failure, I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obseessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn't fret over failings and slights, who realizes her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgement of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn't worry so much about being bad or good but just recognizes that she's both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad. ” - Ayelet Waldman
45. “أشفق على ولدك من إشفاقك عليه " علي بن أبي طالب رضي الله عنه” - عبدالله محمد الداوود
46. “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
47. “From the time they hit middle school, they start moving away from home. They are not doing anything wrong; it's just the way they are made. They are becoming independent, and they begin redefining themselves through the eyes other people who are not in their immediate family. The older they get, the more important it is to have other voices in their lies saying the same things but in a different way. ” - Reggie Joiner
48. “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
49. “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
50. “Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.” - Jonathan Franzen
51. “The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch.” - Karen Maezen Miller
52. “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
53. “How can families harm us when they love us? Very easily, unfortunately. Most of us overlook one important fact when we think love is enough: Love and respect aren't the same thing.Love is fusion. As a baby, you belong to your parents, you're extension of them. Respect is differentiation: you belong to yourself, and you're an extension of no one. Differentiation is essential for happiness of adults.” - Barbara Sher
54. “Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.” - zadie smith
55. “When our feet talk to us, we listen.” - Alexander Nestoiter
56. “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
57. “There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is—the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It’s too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into her dorm in time for freshman orientation. It’s been marked on the kitchen calendar for weeks—the expiration date on her childhood.” - Susan Wiggs
58. “What a difference it makes to come home to a child!” - Margaret Fuller
59. “No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.” - Abraham Verghese
60. “Believe that God is strong enough to save your children, no matter how you fail.” - Elyse Fitzpatrick
61. “The miracle of children is that we just don’t know how they will change or who they will become.” - Eileen Kennedy-Moore
62. “By loving them for more than their abilities we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments.” - Eileen Kennedy-Moore
63. “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
64. “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
65. “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
66. “If a child sees something in a parent that the child aspires to, he or she will copy that parent and be content. If a children feel that a parent is living a life that shows compassion and understanding, patience and love, that child will not have to reach a stage of rebellion against that parent. Why rebel against someone who has listened to you and wants to help you fufill your dreams? A parent who has proven time and again that growth and happiness of his or her children is priority number one does not have to worry about where these children are heading in life. They will be sensitive and productive members of society for as long as they live.” - Alice Ozma
67. “Even though you can't control outcomes for your child, you can parent unconditionally with all your heart.” - Lisa Coyne
68. “Don't even think about it.""Well, when can I walk by myself?""When you get your driver's license.""You always, always say that." Dillie scowled at him. "That's when everything happens.""It's going to be a busy day," Phin agreed.” - Jennifer Crusie
69. “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
70. “Parents can tell but never teach, unless they practice what they preach.” - Arnold H. Glasow
71. “Being a parent is dirty and scary and beautiful and hard and miraculous and exhausting and thankless and joyful and frustrating all at once. It’s everything. (Confessions of a Scary Mommy, Gallery Books 2012).” - Jill Smokler
72. “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
73. “The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god…And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love’s bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother’s initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile… A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response.” - Huston Smith
74. “If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.” - Jeannette Walls
75. “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
76. “Morality in the general is well enough known by men, but the particular refinements of virtue are unknown by most persons; thus the majority of parents, without knowing it and without intending it, give very bad examples to their children.” - Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
77. “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
78. “Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.” - Bernard Branson
79. “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
80. “I'd rather be a 'THINKER' - Two Healthy Incomes No Kids Early Retirement!” - Kaye D. Walters
81. “Yes it's true, you wake the child inside of you up because you're a Mom!” - Sandra C. Kassis
82. “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
83. “Time grants a unique perspective which allows us to see events through a filter of accumulated wisdom.” - Christopher Earle
84. “Adelaide believes that all children should have enough grown-ups around who love them so that one can tell them to fight, one can tell them not to, and one can tell them not to worry so much.” - Ann-Marie MacDonald
85. “Blame or credit, does not belong to the child alone. Parents, those who raised the child, must be given equal credit, or blame. That does not change, when the child is one, twenty or ninety years old.” - Omar Kiam
86. “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
87. “Never forget,Each day that we have together is a precious gift.In the web of daily living, we are creating character.Let's take the time to create memories, listen and observe.Time flees, and it does not return.If we lose today, it is gone forever.Let's live for the present, and be prepared for the future. Let's grow strong, let's grow bigger, let's grow TOGETHER!” - Lina Cuartas
88. “Interesting how fashion is cyclical,” Jaccob said when she came out of the store with two black plastic bags. “Goth was the look when I was young, too.” “It’s not a look,” Chuck said. “I’m just wearing my feelings on the outside.” “Uh huh.” His phone buzzed. “Hang on a second." He rolled up his sleeve to check his HUD, but the call hadn’t come through there. Huh. He had to pick up his phone and check the read-out, which listed a phone number: an old school page. “That’s funny…” “Dad, you’re doing that thing again,” Chuck said. “What thing?” Jaccob asked. “That thing where you have to check every single doohickey you carry around.” “I am not.” Jaccob took his hand out of his coat pocket, where he’d been reaching to check his police scanner or music player (he hadn’t decided which to use first).” - Erik Scott de Bie
89. “You are mine for a moment, but you are His, forever His.” - Matt Hammitt
90. “To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality had been realized - how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn't care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.” - Andrew Solomon
91. “So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.” - Virginia Satir
92. “This is my life's work. It is a user's manual to the human being, a parenting book ... and how to be the best you can be.” - Faye Snyder
93. “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
94. “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
95. “The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can't cut corners.” - Dave Eggers
96. “Surely, our greatest parental hope is that our children attain a state of righteousness. It is the only sure road to happiness. But to attain such a state requires that they be decent as well as compliant. I know many, many young people who are not "righteous" in the usual sense. But they are wonderfully decent people with many praiseworthy qualities. They are not "devout" in the sense that they attend church faithfully, dress or groom themselves traditionally, or publicly declare their devotions, but they are kind, honest, hard working, concerned for others, and unselfish.” - Dr. Glenn I. Latham
97. “Sometimes our work as caregivers is not for the faint of heart. But, you will never know what you are made of until you step into the fire. Step bravely!” - Deborah A. Beasley
98. “My mothering needed a tad more Mother Theresa and a lot less Lizzy Borden.” - Irene Tomkinson
99. “I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.” - Brené Brown
100. “When I think of Tomodachi, I think of your mother. Your mother, she too lose her baby. She lose you. That very sad thing for her. Maybe she come looking, and she not find you. You not there when she come. She think you dead for ever. But she see you in her mind. Now as I speak maybe she see you in her mind. You always there. I know. I have son too. I have Michiya. He always in my head. Like Kimi. They dead for sure, but they in my head. They in my head forever.” - Michael Morpurgo
101. “Only those few who are able to surpass their fear of death completely can fully experience the highest forms of life; not the mundane life of the mortal, but the godly life of the resurrected.” - Zeena Schreck
102. “The most important thing anyone can do is raise their kids well.” - Claire Cross
103. “My children taught me the true meaning of unconditional love.” - Yvonne Pierre
104. “The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self esteem intact while he is in school. That is the real risk to his success and to his mental health. Once he's out of school, the world will be different. He'll find a niche where the fact that he can't spell well or didn't read until he was eight, won't matter. But if he starts to hate himself because he isn't good at schoolwork, he'll fall into a hole that he'll be digging himself out of for the rest of his life.” - Dan Kindlon
105. “Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.” - Peggy Noonan
106. “One of pleasures of parenting, future reader: parent can positively influence kid, make moment kid will remember for rest of life, moment that alters his/her trajectory, opens up his/her heart + mind.” - George Saunders
107. “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
108. “If one were to list all the cruelties and maltreatments, both physical and emotional, that parents and adults inflict on children under the guise of love, the list would be a long one. But, going beyond such sinister examples, even kissing and hugging may or may not convey to a child that he is loved.Love is a feeling, an emotional state. Artists, writers, philosophers, poets have tried to define it. Marcel Proust says, "Love is space and time measured by the heart." What is space and time? It is the here and now. It is you.As unfortunately I am no poet, I will try to recall from my own experience how it feels to be truly loved by someone. It makes me feel good, it opens me up, it gives me strength, I feel less vulnerable, less lonely, less helpless, less confused, more honest, more rich; it fills me with hope, trust, creative energy and it refuels me.How do I perceive the other person who gives me these feelings? As honest, as one who sees and accepts me for what I really am, who objectively responds without being critical, whose authenticity and values I respect and who respects mine, who is available when needed, who listens and hears, who looks and sees me, who shares herself - who cares. Cares. To care is to put love in action. The way we care for our babies is then how they experience our love.” - Magda Gerber
109. “Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.” - Annie Dillard
110. “[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
