Parenthood Quotes - Page 3

A rich child often sits in a poor mother's lap.

To become a father is not hard to be a father is however.

That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

When we raise our children to Shine, the future becomes brighter!

He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.

A dash of humor will only add intense gravity to the proceedings, even as a flash of lightning only makes midnight dreariness all the more impressive.

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and in a sense tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent.

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.

Roughly a month into my stay in jail, I began the first of twelve letters. The choice of titles had much to do with my reason (or circumstances) for being incarcerated: I was a parent of a past-marriage; and though the courts had dissolved the marriage long ago, the matter of parenting was still being debated (by me)—but prohibited by the courts. I had to accept the possibility that my days as a father might be behind me while remaining dutiful to the possibility that, at anytime, circumstances could change. On the one hand, I am a former-father, but on the other hand, I cannot be anything but a father to my children—at any age.

Raising teenage sons and daughters is a long and tiresome journey. With God's help the final outcome will be worthwhile.

I wished that I had some other guardian of minor abilities.

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence--so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive.

If children matter, than whom more to stand in the gap than their parents; yet sadly, the parents (or a parent) can ironically become the chief enemy for which the children may hold in contempt…rather than care. Under the “abuse card”, the custodial parent has the aforementioned ability to operate as a double agent: on the one-side, the protector and caretaker; while on the other side, the divider and abuser. Similarly, the state can be integral to The System of dismantling the dad while appearing (and attesting) to be acting in the best interest of the children. Within the second of these two is the divorce industry that has benefited from the spoils of war without regard to the incomparable costs borne by our community and culture.

Parenthood wasn’t about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else’s. When you loved your kids, you’d give up everything to keep them safe and make them happy, and you didn’t care about the other things, the ones that went away.

To bring up a child in the way he should go travel that way yourself once in a while.

A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.

Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way

I demand for the unmarried mother as a sacred channel of life the same reverence and respect as for the married mother for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass our conventions must not be permitted to blaspheme it.

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

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

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

Children are God's gift.

There's a Drunk Midget in My HouseAh, babies! They're more than just adorable little creatures on whom you can blame your farts. Like most people who have had one baby, I am an expert on everythiing and will tell you, unsolicited, how to raise your kid!

He was so much the humblest one that Wendy was especially gentle with him.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.

George III was incapable of passing on a sense of mission to his son might a given some purpose to the crown prince's existence

True friends don't come with conditions.

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.

It would have been helpful if there was a Mayo Clinic chapter about the topic of "leaving." Man, I would have read that chapter over and over -- leaving your wailing baby in the morning without wanting to slit your wrists; leaving your desk even though you are only a half hour away from completing something that would feel so good to wrap up; leaving the building so no one notices that you are actually leaving. I was much more interested in honing that skill than learning how to puree apples and carrots to freeze in ice-cube trays (not that I ever did that either). As long as I was a full-time working mother with a clock to punch or a train to catch -- as I would be for eight more years -- I never figured out how to leave with grace or with so-called conviction.

Kids don't always stop to judge or analyze a new experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one.

There would definitely be way fewer instances of cheating, if the average couple did not have sex only when the woman feels like it.

That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots.

It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.

Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.

Kids need to find someone going the same direction by the same methodology – and try not to fall in love beforehand. – Toby Willis

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.

From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.”~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive

Frankie's chief virtue in my book is the way he talks about his kids.

We've been here dozen of times since we met, but this precious month before the baby is born feels like a last first date. There's a different kind of romance beginning. We will never again be entirely alone in the world

Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.

Married love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood, which today, rightly enough, is much insisted upon, but which at the same time should be rightly understood. Thus, we do well to consider responsible parenthood in the light of its varied legitimate and interrelated aspects.

Babies cry at birth because it is the first time they experience separation from love.

A good mother does not live only for her children. She always has some bond with other mothers, no matter what class, nationality or race they may be. All mothers have the same joys, the same sorrows, the same anxieties. All mothers think first of their child and of children.

I want to promise you / permanence, my constant orbit, but even continents / are revisions. I am only your diving bell in water / hemmed by shifting plates.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

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.

There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.

The Mother Thing makes our world.

Recalling his mother’s endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had “thought that mothers never had to sleep.

He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be noble and selfless, wise and philosophical. Perhaps he would even have kids of his own, and would presumably possess the kind of maturity that comes with fatherhood, the understanding of life as a process.

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

One of the ridiculously difficult things about raising children is that they are constantly developing and changing so that just when you think you have them figured out, they throw you a curve, a new twist you never saw coming. They are like mutating viruses - as soon as you have become immune to their latest shenanigans, they develop a new strain to which you have yet to be exposed. While this constant shape-shifting is one of the greatest challenges of parenting, it is also one of the things which makes them so fascinating and wonderful.

You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years.

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

Despite what you might believe right now, your son’s future is bright. You only need the right tools to help him get there.