Quotes About Parents

Think about reading: Today, parents would love it if their kids read books more because the parents understand the books. Just over 100 years ago, parents were upset because their kids were reading dime-store novels. Parents would say, "I don't want you inside reading anymore. Get outside and play." I guarantee you, in 50 years or so, parents are going to say, "You're not going outside to play until you finish that video game."

I simply wish my parents would have taught me about speciesism and how it was just as evil as racism, sexism and heterosexism. Sadly, my parents were lied to by their parents who were lied to by their parents and so on.

There’s a belief now that the problem with our schools is parents, that if we just had better parents we would have better performing kids and, therefore, we wouldn’t have a problem at all. But what’s missing in that equation is that you do have a lot of parents in this country who are very involved in their children’s education and who do want something better. They want to see better for their kids. They know that they’re in schools that aren’t performing particularly well and if you look at how we treat those parents, it is quite poorly.

Love involves more than just feelings. It is also a way of behaving. When Sandy said, "My parents don't know how to love me," she was saying that they don't know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy's parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call "love" rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behavior.

My parents were involved in everything I did. They were showbiz people themselves. My dad was an actor. They were parents; they did what parents are supposed to do.

Dr. [Paula] Menyuk and her co-workers [at Boston University's School of Education] found that parents who supplied babies with a steady stream of information were not necessarily helpful. Rather, early, rich language skills were more likely to develop when parents provided lots of opportunities for their infants and toddlers to "talk" and when parents listened and responded to the babies' communications.

My family are very supportive and always have been. They weren't the kind of parents that pushed me into it. I know a lot of parents of kid actors I've worked with have pressured them into acting, but my parents are different. I'm really lucky to have them because they let me make my own decisions.

I have been singing since I was two years old, my parents tell me, and started to write songs when I was fifteen. Eventually, my friends and my parents knew that this was something I liked to do. They also knew I had a dream of making my own album. They have always been encouraging me to do something about it, and so I did. So I went to a local radio station in Tromsø, and there I got to record a couple of songs.

It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

I think my parents - my parents were very hands-off, quite liberal in terms of their - they really - they did encourage me, but they never really pushed me into anything, really.

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

My parents both were doing the Civil Rights Movement, were very involved with the civil rights to Congress. And my friends' parents were as well.

Instead of celebrating what makes each child unique, most parents push their children to "fit in" so that they don't "stick out." This unwittingly stomps out individuality and encourages conformity, despite these parents' good intentions

Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family.

One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters.

Outside of my family, I don't really know. They're great people and my parents are great parents, and they brought me up very well, I think. I don't know, I think that's about all the heroes I've had.

Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation - like they say, the past is a foreign country - but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.

[A] new generation, innocent of the divisions of the Cold War, this coming-of-age. ... If its members do not feel the urgency to escape the nuclear danger that some of its parents felt, neither has it developed the deep attachment to nuclear arms also often found among their parents, including most of the governing class. ... The call for abolition should therefore be, among other things, a call from an older generation to younger one.

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.

The last thing I ever want to do is disappoint my parents. If something ever happened to one of my parents, I'd want them to go knowing I made them proud.

Normal people, fear the day their parents die. Screwed up people, fear that their parents are going to live forever. Showing up at your house at weird hours of the night, smelling all funny, with a bunch of their friends. Hey boy, this is Harold, Cecil and Dicky. Dicky lost his wife about a year ago. I hear Erin made cookies. Where can I put my shoes ? If that doesn't scare you, you're not human.

Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer. Glen had been born on the day after Christmas. "My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained. But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.

But I think that parents who criticise their children too much are in fact better than parents who praise their children too much.

It helps parents to feel better if we remind them of our failures with them! And how they turned out just fine despite our imperfections.... We never get over needing nurturing parents. The more we comfort our own adult children, the more they can comfort our grandchildren.

I think a lot of parents hand people over a blueprint and say, This is how youre supposed to do it. And my parents, I think, kind of drew a picture and said, Heres the good stuff in life. How do you get there?

We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians We say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.

My parents want me to be a lawyer or something like that. Something steady. That's always their main concern as parents: "Oh, you need a salary, you need life insurance, why aren't you having kids?" But in the end, they're happy about it.

My parents' deportation gave me so much strength to keep on moving forward, because any type of failure - whether in school or with jobs or rejection from a casting office - nothing could be as bad as what I had already gone through. Nothing could be worse than coming home expecting to see your loving parents and them not being there.

The biggest single problem of American parents today is the foolish idea that you just have to be a friend to your children. Kids need parents, not just another pal. This means being able and willing to say no, to challenge faulty thinking, and to expect accountability.

Both of my parents are teachers. One is in the Waldorf school system in Louisville, Ky., and the other runs a music school. I grew up with loving, supportive, encouraging parents that let me make my own world, and I wish that for every single child.

We grew up in a praying home [with Alex Kendrick], we saw incredible answers to prayer in our parents' lives, they grew up in praying homes, our father launched a Christian school with nothing, basically he had some people that believed in the project but they had very little resources, and we watched our parents deal with those issues first in prayer, and then when they went out knocking on doors they saw amazing doors answered and resources come in.

Parents impose their own limited concepts on their children, often ignoring their temperaments, special needs, and abilities. Your parents and teachers may have mistakenly ignored your strengths or may not have encouraged you to develop them. You can discover your basic capacities by experimenting with things that you always wanted to do. Don't be discouraged by notions that seem "silly" or "foolish" or "not you." Do it! Who knows what will happen?

Our generation has inherited an incredibly beautiful world from our parents and they from their parents. It is in our hands whether our children and their children inherit the same world. We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment.

Home is not fixed - the feeling of home changes as you change. There are places that used to feel like home that don't feel like home anymore. Like, I would go back to Rome to see my parents, and I would feel at home then. But if my parents were not in Rome, which is my city where I was born, I would not feel at home. It's connected to people. It's connected to a person I love.

I take the academic education as seriously as the physical education. That's why I tell parents that the schools can't do it all themselves. The parents can't come home from work and turn on the TV. That's not being a good parent.

I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents. We've got to send messages to our kids about what is important.

Followers of the Way [of Chán], if you want to get the kind of understanding that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you're facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.

Some people say that parents don't matter, and that's not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don't matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.

American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.

When the perfect order prevails, the world is like a home shared by all. Leaders are capable and virtuous. Everyone loves and respects their own parents and children as well as the parents and children of others. The old are cared for, adults have jobs, children are nourished and educated. There is a means of support for all those who are disabled or find themselves alone in the world. Everyone has an appropriate role to play in the family and society. Devotion to public duty leaves no place for idleness. Scheming for ill gain is unknown. Sharing displaces selfishness and materialism.

While not impossible, it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.

If I ever treated being gay as a problem, then I'm going to continuously find problems, I'm never going to find solutions. Students consistently ask about my personal life, and I kindly let them know, "That's my personal life, you don't need to know that." I've never had a negative interaction with students or parents. I try to become a part of the community so that parents can feel as comfortable with their child moving along in the curriculum more so than me being a problem.

Every piece of remotely responsible research that has been done in the last 20 years on this issue has shown there is no difference between children who are raised by same-sex parents and children who are raised by opposite-sex parents. What matters is that children are being raised in a stable, loving environment.

Like tens of millions of Americans, my parents were immigrants. They were poor and did not speak English well. They went to flea markets and sold gifts to make ends meet. Eventually, through hard work, they opened six gift stores in shopping malls. My parents achieved the American dream; they went from being poor to a home and gave my brother and me an amazing education. I wanted to serve the country that gave so much to my family.

My parents made no money whatsoever, but they really knew how to see, as artists. So a big adventure might be, on a hot, dreadful day with no place to go, to go out and draw our chickens with pastels. My parents gave me a sense of wonder.

'Our parents' generation had it a lot tougher than we did. They had to live through the Depression, World War II, and then they had to, you know, try to pick up the pieces of their lives and bring up their children. And, it was a great example for us. I guess we grew up with a certain amount of the ethics our parents had, which is, you know: work hard, make your own way, be independent.

Vaisey said, "Is it because your parents don't understand you?" Charlie said, "No, it's because our parents understand us very well, and that is why they wanted us to go away.

It is misleading to discuss recent changes in family life without emphasizing the fact that for generations some Americans have had to raise children under particularly appalling pressures. Although much of what is worrying American parents is shared by them all, the most grievous problems are those that especially afflict a large minority--the poor, the nonwhite and, in various ways, the parents of handicapped children.