Navigating the journey of parenthood is a profound and transformative experience, filled with a myriad of emotions, challenges, and joys. Whether you’re a new parent marveling at the wonder of your newborn or a seasoned pro watching your children grow, the timeless wisdom encapsulated in inspiring quotes can provide comfort and guidance. This collection of 45 thought-provoking quotes on parenthood aims to celebrate the special bond between parent and child, offering insights that resonate with the heart and remind us of the beauty found in every stage of this incredible adventure. Dive in and let these powerful words inspire and uplift your parenting journey.
1. “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. “What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.” - Rodney Dangerfield
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. “After you are here, I will try not to become one of those parents who brag incessantly about their children, who force them to recite the alphabet backward or sing the Lord's Prayer in German to horrified dinner guests. One of those parents who tell people who aren't interested and haven't askd what their progeny's grade-point average is, what school they go to, how handsome and brilliant and psychic they are. If something goes awry and I do become one of those parents, you have my permission to sneak into my bedroom while I am sleeping and pinch my nostrils shut.” - Suzanne Finnamore
5. “When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.” - Suzanne Finnamore
6. “You are the closest I will ever come to magic.” - Suzanne Finnamore
7. “A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.” - Elizabeth Gaskell
8. “You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.” - P. J. O'Rourke
9. “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
10. “There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.” - Peter De Vries
11. “Having kids - the responsibility of rearing good, kind, ethical, responsible human beings - is the biggest job anyone can embark on. As with any risk, you have to take a leap of faith and ask lots of wonderful people for their help and guidance. I thank God every day for giving me the opportunity to parent.” - Maria Shriver
12. “He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?” - Gustave Flaubert
13. “Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life when they could reach one another in calm” - Philip Roth
14. “That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots. ” - Emily Perkins
15. “Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.” - Orson Scott Card
16. “I have that hypocrisy of a parent in that I'm like,'Come on, you've got to toughen up at the same time let me take care of that for you.” - Craig Ferguson
17. “I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.” - James Lee Burke
18. “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
19. “My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church. In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.” - Italo Calvino
20. “Scratch a female inmate, I've discovered, and you'll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men.” - Cammie McGovern
21. “Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask "why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?"') and shall now cease and desist.” - Christopher Hitchens
22. “Raising teenage sons and daughters is a long and tiresome journey. With God's help the final outcome will be worthwhile.” - Ana Monnar
23. “Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.” - Leif Enger
24. “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” - Richard Dawkins
25. “When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)” - John Irving
26. “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
27. “She watched as he settled down on the bed with Naya skin to skin on his chest. His hand all but covered her tiny body as he stroked her in that changeling way, bonding with her on the most elemental level. Then he purred, and Naya made a happy little sound of delight, very much a cat in her love of touch.” - Nalini Singh
28. “There's a Drunk Midget in My HouseAh, babies! They're more than just adorable little creatures on whom you can blame your farts. Like most people who have had one baby, I am an expert on everythiing and will tell you, unsolicited, how to raise your kid!” - Tina Fey
29. “A soldier's life revolves around his mail. Like many others, I've been able to follow my kid's progress from the day he was born until now he is able to walk and talk a little, and although I have never seen him I know him very well.” - Bill Mauldin
30. “He never had nothing of his own before, except the kid, and he can’t claim but half the credit, there, maybe less. T.J.’s blond like his mamma, and stubborn, too. Won’t let nobody hold him except her. Cries every time his daddy picks him up. Every time he looks in those wet blue eyes, he nearly loses it. His own son hates him. Can’t blame the kid for having an opinion.” - Nadria Tucker
31. “We'd traveled, we'd been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we'd slept in. We'd done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn't want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.” - Liane Moriarty
32. “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
33. “Parenthood doesn’t improve one’s character, it exposes it.” - Leslie A. Gordon
34. “It is not true that "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.” - Andrew Solomon
35. “My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”—Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” - sir Conan Doyle
36. “And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.” - Jessica Valenti
37. “On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents' eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.” - Neal Shusterman
38. “- How does it feel to have a daughter?- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.” - Clarice Lispector
39. “It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman
40. “The debt we owe our parents can never be squared, and jolly good too, because doing so would threaten to nullify all relationship, all emotional commerce between the two generations. Being in debt, just like being in credit, means an active interest applies between the two parties and, once the debt is taken care of, the interest is bound to wane.” - Robert Rowland Smith
41. “Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.” - George Eliot
42. “Apparently, the easiest way to overcome any awkwardness of speaking about sex is to sterilize it and outsource it to the professionals.” - Matthew Lee Anderson
43. “They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.” - Rob Lowe
44. “We are now parents. The love for our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. Edwin Stanton to his wife.” - Doris Kearns Goodwin
45. “Mothers observe all, absorb all, give all, forgive all, offer all, suffer all, feel all, heal all, hope for all, pray for all.But most of all,Mothers love always.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
