When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
Interpretation
Having children changes how you view your own relationship with your parents.
This quote by Salman Rushdie emphasizes the transformative experience of parenthood, suggesting that becoming a parent allows individuals to gain a deeper understanding of their own parents' perspectives and challenges. It highlights the way new responsibilities and emotional connections can alter one's views on family dynamics and relationships.
In practice
During a parenting seminar, you might introduce this quote to illustrate the profound changes that come with raising children.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.
The difference between keeping things clean and keeping kids clean was that things just sat still and waited for the dirt to collect. We kids were carriers. We ran a pickup and delivery service.
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
I think this power of living in our children is one of the sweetest things in the world.
Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.
My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there's this monster - this tiger or lion - that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn't stop. It doesn't matter if they become men or women.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.