Best 405 quotes in «parenthood quotes» category

If you can't afford to give your child the right to pursue their dreams, you have no right to breed.

If you give up on your dreams, let that crush you and destroy you, even if just a little, if your children are watching. Otherwise, when you're telling them that they must pursue theirs, they will look at you and say "you didn't and you're doing just fine.

If you have no arms To hold your crying child but your own arms And no legs but your own to run the stairs one more time To fetch what was forgotten I bow to you If you have no vehicle To tote your wee one but the wheels that you drive And no one else to worry, “Is my baby okay?” When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycare or on that cursed first day of school I bow to you If you have no skill but your own skill To replenish an ever-emptying bank account And no answers but your own to Satisfy the endless whys, hows, and whens your child asks and asks again I bow to you If you have no tongue to tell the truth To keep your beloved on the path without a precipice And no wisdom to impart Except the wisdom that you’ve acquired I bow to you If the second chair is empty Across the desk from a scornful, judging authority waiting For your child’s father to appear And you straighten your spine where you sit And manage to smile and say, “No one else is coming—I’m it.” Oh, I bow to you If your head aches when the spotlight finally shines on your child because your hands are the only hands there to applaud I bow to you If your heart aches because you’ve given until everything in you is gone And your kid declares, “It’s not enough.” And you feel the crack of your own soul as you whisper, “I know, baby. But it’s all mama’s got.” Oh, how I bow to you If they are your life while you are their nurse, tutor, maid Bread winner and bread baker, Coach, cheerleader and teammate… If you bleed when your child falls down I bow, I bow, I bow If you’re both punisher and hugger And your own tears are drowned out by the running of the bathroom faucet because children can’t know that mamas hurt too Oh, mother of mothers, I bow to you. —Toni Sorenson

If your child is constantly interrupting or doing other things to get your attention, he is not getting enough communication of the right kind. Just the fact that you are in the house with him all day does not mean that you are necessarily devoting any time to com- munication of his choice.

I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think?

I had long since wished that they would have been born with a dictionary sized how-to guide in my placenta. It would have been custom printed for each child by God. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I’d been forced to walk through the minefield of parenthood feeling like I was blindfolded and hopping on one leg. Surely my kids should understand that I was trying to know what I was doing, but the verdict still seemed out at the moment.

I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!

I have come to realise that discipline is not about rules. Discipline is about respect.

I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me - obsessive, feminine love.

I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.

I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you.

I inherited curiosity from my Dad.

I knew there was a point in my life where I couldn't go to Baba for much; I had to hide a lot from him, and it wasn't because he wouldn't have listened. He lost my trust somewhere along the line because I didn't think he would be able to handle my life, because it was so different from his own. I want you to know both the good and bad; I want you to see me as your fellow human, and not a God. I want you to see me as your friend one day and to not fear approaching me.

I know hiding your prejudice behind your ignorance isn’t enough. Because I have been the mom scrambling to provide my four-year-old with a somewhat intelligent, unproblematic answer when he went through a phase of questioning bindis (and fashioning his own replicas out of modeling clay). Ignoring things I don’t understand can’t be an option given that I am guiding the next generation.

I know absolutely nothing, Mom. I've been wrong so often. I know nothing of what it takes to raise children and keep them from dying.

I loved her instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was the love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.

I look at my parents the way mothers look at their toddlers. I take every chance to witness them undisturbed. To study every detail as if sitting for an important exam. I take note of their hands, the curves of their ears, the way they envelop a room and greet others. The way their souls shine through when they speak of something they love, like a candid photograph unveiling beauty and truth. Even though I am present in the same space as them, I am distanced because of the intensity of my love. Every heartbeat reminds me of the ephemeral nature of our bodies and the blessedness of these moments until my father looks up from his book and catches me smiling. And like a child he is bewildered for a moment and smiles back.

I loved Duncan and I loved being his mother but I wasn't sure I was prepared to be only his mother. Before we were even married, when Russell and I had gotten our dog, Humbert, I had walked him early one morning, and as I stood on a line for coffee, someone had offered him a dog treat. "I always ask the mommy first," she said, looking at him expectantly. "Oh, I'm not his mother," I said, "I'm just his...friend," and she looked at me with complete contempt. "You're his mother," she had scolded, "Poor dog.

I'm two days away from day after tomorrow Counting the hours to my upcoming sorrow Suddenly I look into the eyes of my child Then all sadness gone as I smile the way she smiled

...imagine you’re minding your own business, walking down the mall, looking for the perfect beard comb. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a midget ninja jumps out from behind one of those shiatsu massage chairs and rapid punches you in the stomach and lower back.

I'm listening to my son right now.

I'm shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win. (as a young man battling his deceased brother's heroic legacy)

In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.

In countless cases, parenthood has been the worst attempt to contribute something positive to the world.

I’m pretty sure that my Restless Leg Syndrome is simply caused my body just fighting the urge to RUN AWAY!

I'm well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued.

I never really grew up until I had kids.

In parenting patience is the greatest virtue.

In our society, if someone wants to be a hairstylist or a kickboxer or a hunting guide -or a schoolteacher- he or she must be trained and licensed by a state agency. No such requirement is necessary for parenthood. Anyone with a set of reproductive organs is free to create a child, no questions asked, and raise them as they see fit, so long as there are no visible bruises- and then turn that child over to the school system so the teachers can work their magic. Maybe we are asking too much of the schools and too little of our parents and kids?.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that my research about parenting was also a means to subdue my anxieties about becoming a parent.... I grew up afraid of illness and disability, inclined to avert my gaze from anyone who was too different – despite all the ways I knew myself to be different. This book helped me kill that bigoted impulse, which I had always known to be ugly. The obvious melancholy in the stories I heard should, perhaps, have made me shy away from paternity, but it had the opposite effect.

In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent that we led him down the garden path—that we enticed him with the prospect of the exotic. (Hadn’t I myself nourished the fantasy that I would eventually land in a country that was somewhere else?) When we shrouded our grown-up mysteries for which Kevin was too young, we implicitly promised him that when the time came, the curtain would pull back to reveal—what? Like the ambiguous emotional universe that I imagined awaited me on the other side of childbirth, it’s doubtful that Kevin had formed a vivid picture of whatever we had withheld from him. But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules, nothing.

Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.

In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. He may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stance as many hands high according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.

In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.

It is imperative that we teach our boys to love themselves, too! One day they will become men, husbands, and fathers. I encourage you to instill self-love early on!

I struggle to discover what these silent sons of mine want, but words have always failed me. They are sullen even as they tell me they are okay. I know they are lying but there is nothing I can do.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day- A sunny day with the leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away Behind a scatter of boys. I can see You walking away from me towards the school with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free Into a wilderness, the gait of one Who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure, eddying away Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem, Has something I never quite grasp to convey About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay. I had worse partings, but none that so Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly Saying what God alone could perfectly show- How selfhood begins with a walking away, And love proved in the letting go.

It is insufficient to only tell your children that racism and racists are bad. It is insufficient to simply explain “We love people of all colors.” It is lazy and near damaging to proclaim a love for all people but never make the leap of actually reaching out to people of color or adding tangible diversity to your life. In a world filled with empty rhetoric, our children don’t need to hear words from us without action. They need to see us embody the beliefs we claim to hold dear.

In thirty years, the narratives of my sons will be different from mine. Because today I am telling my truth and standing in a pool of my trauma, making myself uncomfortable and, hopefully, making you uncomfortable too. Today, I am making it known that when color is clear, when race and inequity are not ignored, and when our differences are not only acknowledged but championed as one of the most valuable aspects of life, we can work together to make meaningful strides toward true social justice.

I remember- The world was in your embrace I was only your little girl It was easy, it was simple I was sleeping in the shade Of your eyelashes.

I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I'd consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.

It doesn't follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him.

I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk again.' (I'll get some today.) 'I need this ironed properly.' (I'll do that today.) 'How hard is it to buy milk?' (Silence.) 'You forgot to call the plumber.' (Sigh.) 'Goddammit, put on your coat, right now, and go out and get some goddamn milk. Now.' These messages and orders brought to you by my father, a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee.

It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed at home.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.

It’s about Nietzsche’s theory of universal debt. Your parents make it possible for you to believe a far better myth than Santa. They let you think that you, as a kid, don’t owe the world a thing. The world can give you, even if just for a few minutes, utter joy without requiring anything from you. It’s not about consumerism. As far as you know, no one buys you these presents. They come out of nothingness, with fantasies of elves attached. You aren’t required to be grateful to your parents or anything like that. They can give to you and nothing is required in return. When you get old enough, when you have kids, you get to enact this myth for them. It has nothing to do with any fat man in a red suit, no matter what we tell ourselves. It’s about owing nothing, and then realizing that you have to do this job of perpetuating this… this fantasy world, whether you like it or not.

It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.

It’s a beautiful thing to see a man put so much trust in his children; to put so much care into their emotional well-being, to build them up from the earliest stages, and motivate them. Most parents are stumped when it comes to their first-born, they are not sure what are the right and wrong things to do, but Mr. Ellison was a natural… He gave his first born everything he never had, and multiplied it with an excessive amount of love and still kept a company going—- face immeasurable amount of pressure and stress, as he said: “ It was the most traumatic period in my life.

It's a strange thing, having a child," he said. It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized that I would do anything - anything - to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It's quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of worth of your own life is changed so much." Tatsu.

It’s certainly TOUGH being AWESOME all the time, but I do it so the kids have someone to look up to!