33 Parenting Quotes

Parenting is a journey filled with moments of joy, challenge, and wonder. Whether you're a seasoned parent or just starting out, words of wisdom can offer comfort, inspiration, and a sense of solidarity. In this post, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 33 parenting quotes to celebrate the highs and navigate the lows of raising children. These quotes, from renowned authors, parenting experts, and everyday moms and dads, capture the essence of what it means to nurture and love the next generation. Dive in and find the perfect quote to guide you through every chapter of the parenting adventure.

1. “My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.” - Anne Fadiman

2. “The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken.” - Justine Larbalestier

3. “It's especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.” - Sean Covey

4. “Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage--vestigial, girlhood rage--inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think Where did you go?” - Lorrie Moore

5. “Who are these people sharing the street with me? What is going on in their worlds, inside their heads? Are they in love? If so, is it the kind that Mum and Dad have? Based on having things in common, like raspberry picking and a love of dogs, and Shakespeare, and long country walks? Or is it the knock-you-out, eat-you-up, set-you-on-fire kind of love that I have longed for-and avoided-all my life?” - Alison Larkin

6. “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.” - Jane Austen

7. “Our parents were a test tube and a turkey baster.” - James Patterson

8. “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

9. “I respect you as my king, and I respect you as my father, but I do not respect you as a man!” - Rebecca McKinsey

10. “If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.” - Christopher Hitchens

11. “Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes...” - Helen Fielding

12. “A criança ao nascer já traz um determinado potencial; são os pais, no entanto, que podem torná-la capaz de realizar esse potencial” - Carlos Messa

13. “Pais que não conhecem a si mesmo não são capazes de evitar a reprodução, em seus filhos, de suas disfunções” - Carlos Messa

14. “There’s no winning arguments with your parents, so why get all pumped up over them? It is way better to dive down and get out of the way than it is to get clobbered by some parental tidal wave.” - Wendelin Van Draanen

15. “Parents shouldn't leave their kids unless —unless they've got to.” - J.K. Rowling

16. “I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.” - Bill Bryson

17. “The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.” - George Bernard Shaw

18. “If you were my child, I would staple you to your bedroom wall.” - Myra McEntire

19. “I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.” - Johann Hari

20. “Our parents can show us a lot of things: they can show us how we are to be and what things we ought to strive for, or they can show us how not to be and what things we ought to stray from, then you may have the kind of parents that show you all the things about you that you want to get rid of and you realize those traits aren't yours at all but are merely your parents' marks that have rubbed off onto you.” - C. JoyBell C.

21. “He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn't she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent superficial letters? And if she did say it - would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.” - Rohinton Mistry

22. “After having so nobly disentangled themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority, by a Clandestine Marriage, they were determined never to forfeit the good opinion they had gained in the World, in so doing, by accepting any proposals of reconciliation that might be offered them by their Fathers – to their farther trial of their noble independence however they never were exposed.” - Jane Austen

23. “You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look,” - Jacqueline Wilson

24. “When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little boy.” - Blake Crouch

25. “When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.” - Blake Crouch

26. “YOU'RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.” - Aimee Bender

27. “She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.” - Jeanette Winterson

28. “exemplar, n.It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done.You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.” - David Levithan

29. “As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.” - Louise Gluck

30. “Take sex, for instance.''What do you want me to do with it?''Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.'[...]Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. 'It's something I'd rather not think about,' he said. 'We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which find impossible to imagine. [...] We all assume we're the result of our own particular immaculate conception.” - John Mortimer

31. “Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.” - Jonathan Franzen

32. “Some of the things I hated my parents for when I was younger are the same things I love my parents for now that I'm older.” - Steve Maraboli

33. “Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)” - Sophie Kinsella