Quotes on Parenting

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

I'm not a parenting expert. In fact, I'm not sure that I even believe in the idea of 'parenting experts.' I'm an engaged, imperfect parent and a passionate researcher. I'm an experienced mapmaker and a stumbling traveler. Like many of you, parenting is by far my boldest and most daring adventure.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all.

To you who are parents, I say, show love to your children. You know you love them, but make certain they know it as well. They are so precious. Let them know. Call upon our Heavenly Father for help as you care for their needs each day and as you deal with the challenges which inevitably come with parenthood. You need more than your own wisdom in rearing them.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

The true test of a person's character is how they treat the people in life that they don't need.

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

Society should see parenting as a public health issue and help parents to bring their children up feeling loved. We have birthing classes, but no parenting classes. The latter is desperately needed if we are to avoid self-destruction.

~My instinct is to protect my children from pain. But adversity is often the thing that gives us character and backbone. It's always been a struggle for me to back off and let my children go through difficult experiences.~

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.

Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.

There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives - the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them. Love them.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.

It behooves a father to be blameless if he expects his child to be.