Child Rearing Quotes

“Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“A mother is a child's first looking glass into the world.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“He had no imagination either-fatal for one engaged in child-rearing”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Even before i had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn't really know.
I didn't know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope.
I didn't understand that sometimes when your kids scream so loudly that the neighbors are ready to call the Department of Child Services, it's because you've served the wrong shape of pasta for dinner.
I didn't realize that those deep-breathing exercises mothers are taught in natural-childbirth class dont really start to pay off until long after the child is out.
I couldn't have predicted how relieved I'd be to learn that other peoples children struggle with the same issues, and act in some of the same ways, mine do. (Even more liberating is the recognition that other parents, too, have dark moments when they catch themselves not liking their own child, or wondering whether it's all worth it, or entertaining various other unspeakable thoughts).
The bottom line is that raising kids is not for whimps.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“No intelligent radical can fail to realize the need of the rational education of the young. The rearing of the child must become a process of liberation by methods which shall not impose ready-made ideas, but which should aid the child's natural self-unfoldment. The purpose of such an education is not to force the child's adaptation to accepted concepts. but to give free play to his [and her] originality, initiative, and individuality. Only by freeing education from compulsion and restraint can we create the environment for the manifestation of the spontaneous interest and inner incentives on the part of the child. Only thus can we supply rational conditions favorable to the development of the child's natural tendencies and his latent emotional and mental faculties. Such methods of education, essentially aiding the child's imitative quality and ardor for knowledge, will develop a generation of healthy intellectual independence. It will produce men and women capable, in the words of Francisco Ferrer, “of evolving without stopping, of destroying and renewing their environment without cessation; of renewing themselves also; always ready to accept what is best, happy in the triumph of new ideas, aspiring to live multiple lives in one life.”
― Alexander Berkman

“From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He's been listening to somebody else tell him what to do... He hasn't changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn't you any,ore; it's his peers.”
― Barbara Coloroso, Kids Are Worth It!: Giving Your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline

“The most effective alternative process [to punishment] is probably extinction. This takes time but is much more rapid than allowing the response to be forgotten. The technique seems to be relatively free of objectionable by-products. We recommend it, for example when we suggest that a parent 'pay no attention' to objectionable behavior on the part of his child. If the child's behavior is strong only because it has been reinforced by 'getting a rise out of' the parent, it will disappear when this consequence is no longer forthcoming. (p. 192)”
― B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior

“When you raise a god instead of a child, you're bound to be serving him for the rest of your days. Same thing holds when you marry a god.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“Young things mainly belong to themselves. How they grow up depends on who gets attached to them.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Children naturally ask all kinds of questions and take a long time to tell their stories, and in millions of homes the parents are doing something else as they reply, “Yes, yes, I see.” And in millions of homes, the parents are surprised when their children don’t listen to them.
Those little bright eyes know when your attention is wandering. When they are telling you the news from school, give your full attention. Everything else can be set aside for the moment. You are teaching your children to listen to you.”
― Eknath Easwaran, Take Your Time: How to Find Patience, Peace, and Meaning

“One day you’re going to get arrested, and when you do, don’t call me. I’ll tell the police to lock you up just to teach you a lesson.”
Because there were some black parents who’d actually do that, not pay their kid’s bail, not hire their kid a lawyer—the ultimate tough love. But it doesn’t always work, because you’re giving the kid tough love when maybe he just needs love. You’re trying to teach him a lesson, and now that lesson is the rest of his life.”
― Trevor Noah, Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“While it's certainly true that raising children is a big job and certainly has emotional resonance, it's really hard to intellectually justify the belief that you're adding something important to the world by adding more people to pollute the planet and compete for opportunities that become more precious as the number of people vying for a chance grows.”
― Amanda Marcotte

“Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“Mothers are not simply models of femininity to their daughters but also examples of how a woman reacts to a man. Daughters learn about fathers, and men, not only by being with Dad but also by observing their parent's marital relationship-- or its unraveling.

When mothers and fathers are supportive or each other, it makes each of their paternal jobs infinitely easier. And parents who cannot bear being in one another's presence reveal as much, if not more, to a child about romantic love as anything the mother or father might say.”
― Victoria Secunda, Women And Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man In Your Life

“TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste for children to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate news and mustard. Well, mustard even has the word 'turd' in it. Maybe I should threaten my kids that if they don't go to bed, I will force them to watch an hour-long newscast about mustard.”
― Jim Gaffigan, Dad Is Fat

“I tried to teach them [his sons] that about the importance of self-discipline, and that the culture of yes is built on a foundation of no.”
― Bill Walton

“In these story telling moments we equip our children, with crucial solution tools for life. To deprive them of these necessary teachable moments is like denying a carpenter the tools of his trade.”
― Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father

“You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There's no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair.”
― Jeffery Deaver

“I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the sweetness of his little lick of tawny hair on his forehead?”
― Phillippa Gregory

“Over and over again, cross-cultural research on infancy teaches the exact same lesson: infants can tolerate—and thrive under—care that most any Western parent would assume would end very badly.”
― Nicholas Day, Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle

“Seemingly every culture before our own has had a single acceptable way to raise a baby. These cultures wouldn't have cared about the new scientific findings: they already knew how babies worked. Their answers were all very different, mind you, but they had this in common: all the other answers were wrong.

Such confidence makes sense. If you have to raise a baby, not study a baby, you'd better settle on an answer, and as long as you have settled on an answer, you may as well be certain about it. Pretty much everyone has been very certain. But if everyone has been very certain, and everyone's certainty has been very different, you start to suspect that there aren't that many certainties after all. There's no one true path. Or put another way: the one true path is forked.”
― Nicholas Day, Baby Meets World: Suck, Smile, Touch, Toddle

“Rules are rules was stuffed into him from the crib like he was a Thanksgiving turkey.”
― James Marshall Smith, Silent Source

“Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince," she said, sounding sad, "but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lesson that way - albeit all the harder for their parents' earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time."

"To do nothing is always easy." Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

"To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.”
― Ian M. Banks

“Child-rearing is notoriously boring, monotonous, and repetitive and yet somehow perpetually changing and intermittent; it can be simultaneously frenetic and eternal.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“Whether you’ve ever considered it or not, you’re an author. And the stories that you write are penned across the hearts of your children. Therefore, be careful with the pen because you’re writing on some very precious paper.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The future is shaped by the people that we send into it. And we must never forget that the child tugging on our pant-legs is one of those people.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough