Best 1680 quotes in «parenting quotes» category

The passion for such children contains no ego motive of anticipated reciprocity; one is choosing against, in the poet Richard Wilbur's phrase, 'loving things for reasons'. You find beauty and hope in the existence, rather than the achievements, of such a child. Most parenthood entails some struggle to change, educate and improve one's children; people with multiple severe disabilities may not become anything else, and there is a compelling purity in parental engagement not with what might or should or will be, but with, simply, what is.

The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?

The partnership between nurses and families is based on mutual trust, and defining the boundaries and rules clearly will help everyone involved, especially your child.

The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.

The point is that we can't behave right when we don't feel right. And kids can't behave right when they don't feel right. If we don't take care of their feelings first, we have little chance of engaging their cooperation. All we'll have left going for us is our ability to use greater force. And since we'd like to reserve brute force for emergencies such as yanking children out of traffic, we've got to face this feelings thing head-on.

The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.

The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.

The problem is not my suitability as a partner, it's my suitability as a father.

The problem is that the media rarely discusses the real reasons behind why women leave their jobs. We hear a lot about the desire to be closer to the children, the love of crafting and gardening, and making food from scratch. But reasons like lack of maternity leave, lack of affordable day care, lack of job training, and unhappiness with the 24/7 work culture-well, those aren't getting very much airtime.

The problem with parenting today? Children are not raised! They are just born and fed and clothed. Then upon them are placed ornaments for the eyes of others to see: superficial actions and ways, all of which pass away as sure as the sun sets every evening! Why are you not raising nobility? Why are you not raising Knights and Queens? Feed those souls, give them character!

The profound experience of childbirth does not produce profound people. If this were so, the guy with ten kids would be a prophet and priests would be out of work.

The progress of a struggling teen has less to do with the application of specific parenting techniques than with the parents’ own patient, persistent efforts to construct relationships with their son or daughter.

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.

There are a hundred ways in which a boy can injure—if not indeed kill—himself. The more adventurous he is and the greater his initiative, the more ways he will find. If you protect him from each of the first hundred, he is sure to find the hundred and first. Though most men can look back on their boyhood and tremble at the narrowness of some of their escapes, most boys do in fact survive more or less intact, and the wise father is the trusting father.

There are 1,440 minutes in every day. How are you using yours?

There are many different ways of approaching parenting as there are cultures. However, in non-industrialized cultures, the similarities are also striking. Extended nursing, co-sleeping, carrying the baby in close physical contact, responding promptly to cries or distress, never leaving a baby alone, are all virtually universal in traditional societies that have not become overly "westernized".

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There’s the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she’d just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn’t feel the need to do the extra-credit problems. I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. “Why not?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do them?” “I didn’t want to miss recess.” A fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time. “Why?” asked Lulu, when I explained this to her. For me this was like asking why I should breathe. “None of my friends do it,” Lulu added. “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m 100% sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit.” Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu’s class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it. “But Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they’re not Asian,” she added. “Aha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn’t say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I’m in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you? You went to recess instead of doing extra credit?” I was almost in tears. “Extra credit is not extra. It’s just credit. It’s what separates the good students from the bad students." "Aww - recess is so fun," Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that, Lulu, like Sophia. always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself - an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States. Rote drilling is another. Once Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

There are parents who use their small children as weapons. They are weak people. Sick people. And their children are watching them, watching how Mom and Dad use them as weapons.

There aren’t always good reasons for a child’s emotions, or easy solutions for them, but by at least acknowledging them and trying not to judge them, we are teaching respect.

There aren´t always good reasons for a child´s emotions, or easy solutions for them, but by at least acknowledging them and trying not to judge them, we are teaching respect. Imagine if adults´ emotional states were constantly disregarded as ridiculous, unnecessary, or wrong and we were told how to feel instead.

There are really places in your heart that you don't know exist until you love a child.

There are the parents who suffer deeply and genuinely, because their son (or daughter) does not love them, and who, simultaneously, ignore, oppose or attempt to destroy everything they know of their son's convictions, values and goals, never thinking of the connection between these two facts, never making an attempt to understand their son. The world they never made and dare not challenge, has told them that children love parents automatically.

There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is—the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It’s too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into her dorm in time for freshman orientation. It’s been marked on the kitchen calendar for weeks—the expiration date on her childhood.

The reason any person yaks excessively is because his communication is not being adequately acknowledged. He just keeps trying to be heard.

There is hope in the challenge.

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork?

There is no better way to crush someone’s self-confidence than to tell this person that her / his choice was wrong, and that she / he should have listened to us (parents). Because, obviously, we know how to make the right choices and she / he does not.

The recent spate of magazines for "parents" (i.e., mothers) bombard the anxiety-induced mothers of America with reassurances that they can (after a $100,000 raise and a personality transplant) produce bright, motivated, focused, fun-loving, sensitive, cooperative, confident, contented kids just like the clean, obedient ones on the cover.

There is no better example for our children, then the one we set before them every day

There is no better therapy than a hug from a child.

There is no question that engagement requires sacrifice, but that's what we signed up for when we decided to become parents.

There is nothing glorious about creating life out of passionate penetration. Even the animals can do that. The real glory comes when the life you create becomes the help in the lives of countless other humans.

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

There is nothing wrong in finding the shortcomings of your father, if you want to be a better father for your son!

There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.

There is only one thing worse than a little baby who won't stop crying: it is a big baby who won't stop whining about it

There is perhaps no harder truth for a parent to bear, but it is one that no parent on earth knows better than I do, and it is this: love is not enough. My love for Dylan, though infinite, did not keep Dylan safe, nor did it save the 13 people killed at Columbine High School, or the many others injured and traumatized. I missed the subtle signs of psychological deterioration that, had I noticed, might have made a difference for Dylan and his victims - all the difference in the world.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

There’s a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don’t have their father’s unconditional love.

There's a world of difference between, "Look at this mess you made!" and "I don't like to see food on the floor!

The role of the parents is not to become the child, but to provide guidance to it, to walk it through the same abyss the parents walked through but with the help of a light called parental guidance. - On Parenting.

There's no single effort more radical in it's potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.

There’s nothing wrong with an adult being a child, except whining like one.

The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.

There’s one thing you can start doing right now that will change how you communicate with any young human: Remember what it’s like to be one.

There's not a lot I can fix for her anymore. Band-Aid and bedtime story days are almost over. This, I can fix with a simple Welcome.

There was the odd suburban thunderbolt, but they were mostly those people who'd found each other; they were golden and bright-lit and funny. Often they seemed in cahoots somehow, like jailbirds who wouldn't leave; they loved us, they liked us, and that was a pretty good trick.

The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time.

The sacred gift of parenthood is inscribe in the universal words ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’.

These children, who are our equals, whom we ought to consider as our models, we treat them as though they were our subjects. They are allowed no will of their own. And have we, then, none ourselves? Whence comes our exclusive right? Is it because we are older and more experienced? Great God! from the height of thy heaven thou beholdest great children and little children, and no others; and thy Son has long since declared which afford thee greatest pleasure. But they believe in him, and hear him not,—that, too, is an old story; and they train their children after their own image, etc.