Quotes on Parenthood

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

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

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out.

There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.

Occasionally some individuals let the seeming ordinariness of life dampen their spirits. Though actually coping and growning, others lack the quiet, inner-soul satisfaction that can steady them, and are experiencing instead, a lingering sense that there is something more important they should be doing . . .as if what is quietly achieved in righteous individual living or in parenthood are not sufficiently spectacular.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

I learned that money can be a lot of things,It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.

Up until I became a father, it was all about self-obsession. But then I learned exactly what it's all about: the delight of being a servant.

Everyone wins when children - and especially girls – have access to education. An educated girl is likely to increase her personal earning potential and prepare herself for a productive and fulfilling life, as well as reduce poverty in the whole community. Investing in girls' education also helps delay early marriage and parenthood. Our booming economies in Africa need more female engineers, teachers and doctors to prosper and sustain growth.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Parenting is an impossible job at any age.

It is vital that when educating our children's brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts.

Every cliche about kids is true; they grow up so quickly, you blink and they're gone, and you have to spend the time with them now. But that's a joy.

Motherhood is not a hobby, it is a calling. You do not collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It is not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It is what God gave you time for.