Parenting Quotes

And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!

Mother's words of wisdom: Answer me! Don't talk with food in your mouth!

I started out in life with two great advantages: No money and good parents.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.

Once your children are grown up and have children of their own, the problems are theirs and the less the older generation interferes the better.

I think people who have good parents come into the world with a strength, yes, and an advantage.

The reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them up.

The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.

It's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have...One pair that see through closed doors. Another in the back of her head...and, of course, the ones in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and reflect 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Marry your son when you will, but you daughter when you can.

My parents have always been very respectful of me so I’ve always been really respectful of them. My worst fear is to let them down so that’s why I don’t misbehave.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Too many people treat parenting like it's the 20th item on their to-do list.

Few things make the life of a parent more rewarding and sweet as successful children.

That's the gift that a mother can give, to make everyone feel like they are the special one.

Give your child a spanking once a day. If you don't know why, he does.

Raising kids is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.

I remember my mother and father arguing about light bulbs because my father thought he could save money by putting 25-watt bulbs instead of 60-watt bulbs and my mother was trying to explain to him that her children needed to learn to read so that they could go to college. He couldn't see that.

If a mute kid swears, should his mother wash his hands with soap?

Kids need love the most when they're acting most unlovable.

It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.

The universe, he observed, makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.

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.

Would you deny your son or your daughter the ecstasy of finding someone to love?

Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

I gave you the best of me, he'd told her once, and with every beat of her son's heart, she knew he'd done exactly that.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I've had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm's way until they could be their own guides.

If you talk to your children, you can help them keep their lives together. If you talk to them skillfully, you can help them to build future dreams.

The child who has not been disciplined with love by his little world will be disciplined, generally without love, by the big world.

By giving children lots of affection, you can help fill them with love and acceptance of themselves. Then that's what they will have to give away.

"Baby, you know?" my mother once said to me. "I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met - and I'm not including my mother or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in that." She said, "You are very intelligent and you're very kind, and those two qualities do not often go together." Then she went across the street and got in her car, and I went the other way down to the streetcar. I thought, "Suppose she's right. She's intelligent - and she's too mean to lie." You see, a parent has the chance - and maybe the responsibility - to liberate her child. And my mom had liberated me when I was 17.

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It's the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.

Never play peek-a-boo with a child on a long plane trip. There's no end to the game. Finally I grabbed him by the bib and said, "Look, it's always gonna be me!"

I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating.

Most business mistakes are irreversible setbacks, but you get another chance. There are two things in life that you don't get another chance at - marrying the wrong person and what you do with your children.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least

My son did not show signs of a money deficiency until he opened his small fist in the nursery and found it was empty.

Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.

We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if webelieved in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men.

The months before my son was born,I used to yell from night to morn,'Whatever it is, I'm against it!No matter what it is or who commenced it,I'm against it!'

Everything a baby does strikes a parent as the most magical thing he/she has ever seen.

Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.

Let us hope manufacturers can come up with a diaper that is environmentally sound. To go back to cloth would send us back to the day when breathing and raising a baby at the same time were incompatible.

It is no use to preach to [children] if you do not act decently yourself.

Explain to me how he [her son] can ride a bicycle, run, play ball, set up a camp, swing, fight a war, swim and race for eight hours ... and has to be driven to the garbage can.

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

We cannot meet 21st Century challenges with a 20th Century bureaucracy.

Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn't turn it on.

It comes down to a doubt about the wisdomOf having children after having had them,So there is nothing we can do about itBut warn the children they perhaps should have none.

Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

The kind of man who thinks that helping with the dishes is beneath him will also think that helping with the baby is beneath him, and then he certainly is not going to be a very successful father.

If parents would only realize how they bore their children.