Parenting Quotes

“Children are gifts. They are not ours for the breaking. They are ours for the making.”
― Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One

“If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.”
― Henry Cloud

“An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.”
― Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

“Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.”
― John Holt

“No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.”
― Phyllis Diller

“To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins," I will is more important than IQ. "It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it's been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to success and happiness. Discipline, hard work, perserverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important.”
― Rafe Esquith, There Are No Shortcuts

“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, The Polysyllabic Spree

“He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I gave you life. You’re wasting it.”
― Stephenie Meyer

“You are the reason why he exists on this earth. You don't have the right to abandon him just because he's inconvenient or has trouble in school.”
― Michael Crichton, Next

“Your children need your presence more than your presents.”
― Jesse Jackson

“There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

“Our greatest duty to our children is to love them first. Secondly, it is to teach them. Not to frighten, force, or intimidate our children into submission, but to effectively teach them so that they have the knowledge and tools to govern themselves.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“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, Adventures in Gentle Discipline: A Parent-to-Parent Guide

“Taking care of myself doesn't mean 'me first.' It means 'me, too.”
― L.R. Knost

“Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.”
― Louise Bates Ames

“A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.”
― Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost

“The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future”
― Stefan Molyneux

“I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“I've realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.”
― Benedict Cumberbatch

“Society tried to teach me that children are by nature selfish, out-of-control, and demanding, that their goal is power and that they are always trying to see how much they can get away with, that you can't let children manipulate you or become too dependant, and that disobedience equals disrespect. As a mother, I have come to believe strongly that my child's primary goals are having his needs met, feeling connected to others, and feeling self-worth. His misbehavior is an attempt to get a need met or to feel significance and connection, done in an appropriate way.... my job as a parent is to help my child identify and meet those needs in appropriate ways." - Lisa S.”
― Hilary Flower, Adventures in Gentle Discipline: A Parent-to-Parent Guide

“But it's achild!You're aman!"

"Your powers of observation are formidable," said Charles. "You are a credit to your optician.”
― Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers

“We teach our child many things I don’t believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by example, that the greatest defeat in life was to miss a train. Only after many years did I learn that an escaping train carries away with it nothing vital to my health. Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.”
― E.B. White, One Man's Meat

“My kid, her life. I want for her what she wants for herself.”
― Laura Castoro

“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

“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, North and South

“Ha! Kids! You have no idea what you put your parents through, either. Wait till you have your own, you'll see. That's when you'll know what it really feels like.".. "What what feels like?"... "Love," said Angela.”
― Tess Gerritsen

“History repeated itself. The 'don't do the things I did' mantra was tiresome pish. The best way to make sure your children don't grow up as cunts is not to be one yourself - or not to let them SEE you being one. This is easier as a sober artist in Santa Barbara than as an alcoholic jailbird in Leith.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Blade Artist