Best 405 quotes in «parenthood quotes» category

That's parents. Fucking up their kids for generations.

The aphorism "If you want something done, ask a busy woman" is in direct acknowledgment of the efficiency boot camp parenthood puts you through.

The answer to the question ‘How many children do you have?’ and the one to the question ‘How many children are you raising?’ are not identical in all cases: some men are not taking care of their own children, some are knowingly or unknowingly raising other men’s children, and some do not even know that they each have a child, another child, or other children.

The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.

The author stipulates that while television lately background noise for a child, it tends to shift to the foreground for the adult. The adult pays enough attention to the media attention is paid to the child.

The best way to teach a child is live an exemplary life.

The birth of a child is a joy to the parent and the world.

The cane is just not going to cut it. I shared with some of my colleagues that these brothers live in neighborhoods where they are getting whapped with a piece of stick all night, stabbed with knives, and pegged with screwdrivers that have been sharpened down, and they are leaking blood. When you come to a fella without even interviewing him, without sitting him down to find out why you did what you did, your only interest is caning him, because you are burned out and frustrated yourself. You say to him, ‘Bend over, you are getting six.’ And the boy grits his teeth, skin up his face, takes those six cuts, and he is gone. But have you really been effective? Caning him is no big deal, because he’s probably ducking bullets at night. He has a lot more things on his mind than that. On the other hand, we can further send our delinquent students into damnation by telling them they are no body and all we want to do is punish, punish, punish. Here at R.M. Bailey, we have been trying a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, nothing that we do is better than the voice itself. Nothing is better than talking to the child, listening, developing trust, developing a friendship. Feel free to come to me anytime if something is bothering you, because I was your age once before. Charles chuck Mackey, former vice principal and coach of the R. M. Bailey Pacers school.

The Child is the Alpha and the Omega of a parent’s happiness.

The child's existence turned a plain world to riches. Her life raised up like this, the child giving point and purpose to each day, the care of him transforming her, widening and deepening her.

The circumstances surrounding your birth are not as important as the opportunity to live life.

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.

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

The doc swore she came out screamin' in the key of E.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice. I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula. You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

The more you care, the more you fear.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

The mother was conflicted between what she knows that what's possible.

The night noise of the house was precious now, the stirrings below, the children’s breath which collected in the halls and made the atmosphere of his home. He was there, if something happened, fire, burglary, sickness, he was there to help. His own breath met his children’s.

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides

Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

The plants and flowers I raised about my hut I now surrender To the will Of the wind

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.

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.

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 many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father.

There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.

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

There is a wide distinction between confessing sin as a culprit, and confessing sin as a child. The Father's bosom is the place for penitent confessions.

There goes a lot of pain in raising children. But the pain is equally or overtly compensated by the joy of parenthood.

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 loving a child too much.

There is no such thing as illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.

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

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.

the sculpting of the brain’s circuitry during this period of brain growth depends to a great degree on what a child experiences day-to-day.

They don't know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.

The speaker says one of the blessings of the family of God is that the enthusiasm of children influences their elders while experience seasons the younger members.

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.

They might curse you, even despise you for doing so, but it took strong measures to ensure that a boy lived long enough to become a man.

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-–something they heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures. . . And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and he believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries––perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.

Things always show up when they don't arrive.

Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons - sometimes out of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.

Travel is costly yes, but it pays dividends too.

Thus bound together, they sheltered the child from the cold, dark night, enveloping him in warmth.