Parenting is a journey filled with joys, challenges, and countless lessons along the way. Sometimes, a few words of wisdom can provide the encouragement and perspective needed to navigate this rewarding path. We've gathered a carefully selected collection of 119 inspiring parenting quotes that celebrate the beauty, strength, and love involved in raising children. Whether you’re a new parent or have years of experience, these quotes offer heartfelt insights to uplift and motivate you every step of the way.
1. “If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.” - Bette Davis
2. “All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them. ” - Erma Bombeck
3. “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” - Benjamin Franklin
4. “That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.” - Ursula Hegi
5. “I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.” - Phyllis Diller
6. “Independence isn't doing your own thing; it's doing the right thing on your own.” - Kim John Payne
7. “...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
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. “Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.” - John Wilmot
10. “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
11. “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
12. “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
13. “Say “no” only when it really matters. Wear a bright red shirt with bright orange shorts? Sure. Put water in the toy tea set? Okay. Sleep with your head at the foot of the bed? Fine. Samuel Johnson said, “All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.” - Gretchen Rubin
14. “Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.” - Leo Tolstoy
15. “And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?” - Catherine Gilbert Murdock
16. “Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.” - Bill Ayers
17. “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
18. “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
19. “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
20. “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
21. “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
22. “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
23. “It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.” - Lionel Shriver
24. “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
25. “I gave you life. You’re wasting it.” - Stephenie Meyer
26. “. . . Mrs. Lambchop sighed and shook her head. "You're at the office all day, having fun," she said. "You don't realize what I go through with the boys. They're very difficult."Kids are like that," Mr. Lambchop said. "Phases. Be patient, dear.” - Jeff Brown
27. “Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?” - Richard Paul Evans
28. “Raise your children to love and embrace others. Tell them they are beautiful; they may grow up to be stars one day, and "beautiful" will never mean as much in a magazine as it will coming from you.” - Kaiden Blake
29. “I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.” - Jodi Picoult
30. “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
31. “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
32. “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
33. “To those of you who are yet to plunge into the zygote pool and want to know what both plumbless horror and pure love feels like, have yourself a baby...” - Conrad Williams
34. “A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?” - Stephen Colbert
35. “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
36. “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
37. “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
38. “Before I had kids, I always found it funny how people would talk about their children like they were the cutest things on the planet and how every little thing they did was endlessly fascinating. Now that I've had kids, I can say with certainty that, my children really are the cutest things on this planet and every little thing they do is endlessly fascinating...” - Jennifer Miller
39. “Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.” - Nick Hornby
40. “God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.” - Barbara Kingsolver
41. “There is nothing that moves a loving father's soul quite like his child's cry.” - Joni Eareckson Tada
42. “If your kid needs a role model and you ain't it, you're both fucked.” - George Carlin
43. “I believe one of the most sacrificial acts of love adoptive parents can do is to give up their preconceptions and agendas about what their child's views "should" be and be open to hear the conflicting emotions and thoughts their child often experiences.” - Sherrie Eldridge
44. “Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.” - Russell Baker
45. “You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.” - Lisa Gardner
46. “I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me.” - Dave Eggers
47. “But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.” - Barbara Kingsolver
48. “Raising teenage sons and daughters is a long and tiresome journey. With God's help the final outcome will be worthwhile.” - Ana Monnar
49. “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
50. “I'm so cool that the kids come to my bedroom and go, 'Mom! Turn the music down!” - Melissa Etheridge
51. “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
52. “I raised my three teens with love, perseverance, tenacity, sweat, tears, prayers, lighting candles, and the list could go on.” - Ana Monnar
53. “I want my girls to see their relationship with me as a place of refuge, a place they can retreat to for honesty, unconditional love, and support. I want to teach them and have them trust me, not fear me. I want to preserve the gentle souls that I see in them." -Liz. M.” - Hilary Flower
54. “The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
55. “Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)” - Chandler Burr
56. “Intensive mothering is the ultimate female Olympics: We are all in powerful competition with each other, in constant danger of being trumped by the mom down the street, or in the magazine we're reading. The competition isn't just over who's a good mother--it's over who's the best. We compete with each other; we compete with ourselves. The best mothers always put their kids' needs before their own, period. The best mothers are the main caregivers. For the best mothers, their kids are the center of the universe. The best mothers always smile. They always understand. They are never tired. They never lose their temper. They never say, "Go to the neighbor's house and play while Mommy has a beer." Their love for their children is boundless, unflagging, flawless, total. Mothers today cannot just respond to their kids' needs, they must predict them--and with the telepathic accuracy of Houdini. They must memorize verbatim the books of all the child-care experts and know which approaches are developmentally appropriate at different ages. They are supposed to treat their two-year-olds with "respect." If mothers screw up and fail to do this on any given day, they should apologize to their kids, because any misstep leads to permanent psychological and/or physical damage. Anyone who questions whether this is the best and the necessary way to raise kids is an insensitive, ignorant brute. This is just common sense, right?” - Susan J. Douglas
57. “I just want my kids to love who they are, have happy lives and find something they want to do and make peace with that. Your job as a parent is to give your kids not only the instincts and talents to survive, but help them enjoy their lives."(The Power of One: Belief.net Interview; July 2005)” - Susan Sarandon
58. “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
59. “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
60. “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
61. “Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.” - zadie smith
62. “The one encouragement we can always give our children (and one another) is that God is more powerful than our sin, and He's strong enough to make us want to do the right thing.” - Elyse Fitzpatrick
63. “We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)” - Kristina Riggle
64. “Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.” - Lois McMaster Bujold
65. “A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.” - Jean Liedloff
66. “No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.” - Abraham Verghese
67. “It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.” - Anne Lamott
68. “Believe that God is strong enough to save your children, no matter how you fail.” - Elyse Fitzpatrick
69. “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
70. “The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.” - Eileen Kennedy-Moore
71. “When dreaded outcomes are actually imminent we don't worry about themwe take action. Seeing lava from the local volcano make its way down the street toward our house does not cause worry it causes running. Also we don't usually choose imminent events as subjects for our worrying and thus emerges an ironic truth: Often the very fact that you are worrying about something means that it isn't likely to happen.” - Gavin De Becker
72. “We all need a cheering committee and parents are a child's most important fans!” - Vivian Kirkfield
73. “He sounded absolutely miserable. “Are you ever going to speak to me?” - Maggie Stiefvater
74. “All parents set out with expectations, hopes and dreams for their child. When a child is diagnosed with a health problem, these aspirations are altered. While one parent is hoping to see their child graduate from university, another is praying that they can live pain free” - Sharon Dempsey
75. “I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.” - Marian Wright Edelman
76. “Even though you can't control outcomes for your child, you can parent unconditionally with all your heart.” - Lisa Coyne
77. “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
78. “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
79. “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
80. “Mothers who know do less. They permit less of what will not bear good fruit eternally. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less activity that draws their children away from their home. Mothers who know are willing to live on less and consume less of the world’s goods in order to spend more time with their children—more time eating together, more time working together, more time reading together, more time talking, laughing, singing, and exemplifying. These mothers choose carefully and do not try to choose it all.” - Julie B. Beck
81. “People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...” - Jeannette Walls
82. “No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.” - Jeannette Walls
83. “What doesn't kill you will make you stronger” - Jeannette Walls
84. “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
85. “Parenthood doesn’t improve one’s character, it exposes it.” - Leslie A. Gordon
86. “I'd rather be a 'THINKER' - Two Healthy Incomes No Kids Early Retirement!” - Kaye D. Walters
87. “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
88. “They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma [an honorific title for a woman] and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon. It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. [emphasis mine] It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.” - Arundhati Roy
89. “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
90. “Perhaps I did nothing because I don't have enough fear to be a good parent.” - Kaui Hart Hemmings
91. “Time grants a unique perspective which allows us to see events through a filter of accumulated wisdom.” - Christopher Earle
92. “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
93. “Quality time is not the same as the everydayness of being together. Let’s neither glorify nor undervalue.” - Don Elium
94. “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
95. “Now, the error which many parents commit in the treatment of the individual at this time(adolescense) is, insisting on the same unreasoning obedience as when all he had to do in the way of duty was, to obey the simple laws of "Come when you're called," and "Do as you're bid!" But a wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease.” - Elizabeth Gaskell
96. “I figure when my husband comes home from work, if the kids are still alive, then I've done my job.” - Roseanne Barr
97. “If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.” - Randy Alcorn
98. “The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well.” - Pamela Druckerman
99. “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
100. “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
101. “Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, wheere love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love.” - Cynthia Voigt
102. “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.
103. “What the world really needs is courageous parenting from mothers and fathers who are not afraid to speak up and take a stand.” - Larry R. Lawrence
104. “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
105. “The key is to understand that our children don't belong to us—they belong to God. Our goal as parents must not be limited by our own vision. I am a finite, sinful, selfish man. Why would I want to plan out my children's future when I can entrust them to the infinite, omnipotent, immutable, sovereign Lord of the universe? I don't want to tell God what to do with my children—I want Him to tell me!” - Voddie T. Baucham Jr.
106. “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
107. “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
108. “The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness.” - Gordon Neufeld
109. “Parenting is a giant responsibility forever, so we need to learn how to drop the guilt and go easy on ourselves when we mess up.” - Rachael Bermingham
110. “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
111. “Generally, crises were Mom's domain. Dad's job was to listen, nod, act curmudgeonly, and offer to pay for things.” - Lisa Wingate
112. “Replace a goal of obedience with one of connection and trust instead. Children are drawn to follow those to whom they are emotionally connected. By parenting not for obedience but for relationship, kids are naturally inclined to follow your lead.” - Kelly Bartlett
113. “The greatest challenge of parenting is in the inner work it requires: the strength and confidence in believing that we are not in control of, but the answer for our children.” - Kelly Bartlett
114. “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
115. “The Tone is the Message.” - Kevin T. McCarney
116. “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
117. “Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.” - Alfie Kohn
118. “I began to see that creating a healthy family, in which members develop the ability for mutual respect and caring, is a prerequisite for a more peaceful world. For, it is the family that creates the social fabric of our culture, as Mahatma Gandhi so poignantly illustrated, when he said:If we are to teach real peace on this world...we shall have to begin with children; and if they will grow up in their own innocence, we won't have to struggle; we won't have to pass fruitless, idle resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are covered with that peace and love for which, consciously or unconsciously, the whole world is hungeringSweeping floors, wiping noses, singing children to sleep...such is the work of peacemakers. Blessed be the peacemakers.” - Shea Darian
119. “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
