Parenting Quotes - Page 9

Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?

Because we don't know the state of our children's souls, and because they might simply want to please us by praying to be saved, we must continue to give them the Law and encourage them to ask God for faith to believe that He is as good as He says He is.

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times. Demonstrate that people can be trusted, that the environment can be trusted, that we live in a benign universe.

By loving them for more than their abilities we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments.

Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.

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

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do - you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

There is nothing that moves a loving father's soul quite like his child's cry.

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

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.

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

Oftentimes I felt ridiculous giving my seal of approval to what was in reality such a natural thing to do, sort of like reinventing the wheel and extolling its virtues. Had parents' intuition sunk so low that some strange man had to tell modern women that it was okay to sleep with their babies?

Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.