Quotes About Parents

I remember my parents yelling at each other and at me from an early age, and I remember a lot of things smashing. I try to look for the happy memories from the brief time my parents were married, and I can't really recall that. From the start things were messed up, and I just kept moving through the years and trying to pick out the little bits of evidence that would help me prove to myself that it wasn't my doing. But it took finding out somebody really does love me, who's not my parents or a relative, to really know that I was loveable.

I want to ask parents, when daughters turn 11 or 14, they keep a tab on their movements. Have these parents ever asked their sons where they have been going, who they have been meeting? Rapists are somebody's sons as well! Parents must take the responsibility to ensure that their sons don't go the wrong direction.

There's a natural tendency for children to, in some sense, inherit the cultural values of their parents. I'm not against that, that's fine, that's wonderful. What I am against is labelling. Nobody ever labels a child a cricketer because his father is a cricketer, but they do label a child a Catholic because his parents are Catholic. I think it's more or less unique. Nobody ever labels a child a socialist or a conservative or a liberal because that's what their parents are.

People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.

I think my parents were really smart parents. I think they were, actually, pretty progressive for the time. The one thing that they really wanted me to know is what makes me tick, what I am about, how I approach life. And I think what my parents really wanted for me was for me to be who I am.

Both of my parents are music teachers. My mother owns the school that I taught in. My brothers and sisters are musicans. My mom pushed me all the time. She knew that I could do it. She knew more than I did. She thought I would go somewhere. She gave me the job and helped me get equipment, which a lot of parents don't do. Alot of my students had to go out and fight for it.

I grew up in a very loving middle class family. My parents were educators. I'm not even the first PhD in my family. They tried to shield me, just as other parents in my neighborhood tried to shield their children. But you knew there was a reason that you couldn't go to that theme park or to a movie theater or to a hamburger stand. They couldn't shield you completely. What they did though was they never let it be an excuse for not achieving, and they always said racism is somebody else's problem, not yours. They tried in that way not to make us bitter about Birmingham.

I know from my own experience as a parent that parents probably teach most powerfully not through their words but through their deeds. And my parents taught me through the stories of their lives. And I don't take any credit for the things that they did or the things that they experienced, but they made a great impression on me.

My parents are European immigrants. And I think as Europeans there are so many languages in close proximity that it's part of the culture to try to learn at least one other language. So my parents really encourage it in the house. Chinese would be really great to learn - like Mandarin or Cantonese. Portuguese would be incredible.

Parents wrongly assume that their daughters live in a world similar to the one they experienced as adolescents. They are dead wrong. Their daughters live in a media-drenched world floded with junk values. As girls turn from their parents, they turn to this world for guidance about how to be an adult.

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.

In the nurturing family...parents see themselves as empowering leaders not as authoritative bosses. They see their job primarily as one of teaching their children how to be truly human in all situations. They readily acknowledge to the child their poor judgment as well as their good judgment; their hurt, anger, or disappointment as well as their joy. The behavior of these parents matches what they say.

No one has found a gene for IQ. "Heritability" means that identicial twins are more similar than fraternal twins, right? Fraternal twins more similar than non-siblings. The heritability is 50 percent if your parents went to college. But if your parents never graduated high school the heritability is zero. Zero.

It's important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.

I’ve noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse.

Anyone who grows up with parents who are very influential, there are cases where people run away from that if they have parents who are really lame.

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.

In the segregated South, education was almost like armor. It was a way to put yourself in a category where even with the slings and arrows and humiliations of racism and segregation, somehow you had better control of the situation. I always said my parents understood that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but they and their parents believed that you could control your reaction to your circumstances.

Because of the fact that we've been through so much, we're going to appreciate every step of being parents. I think we're going to savor it and cherish it and we're going to be the best parents we can be.

I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"

Children thrive in a variety of family forms; they develop normally with single parents, with unmarried parents, with multiple caretakers in a communal setting, and with traditional two-parent families. What children require is loving and attentive adults, not a particular family type.

Babies aren't really born of their parents. They are born of every kind word, loving gesture, hope, and dream their parents ever had.

When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!

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.

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.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.

I've been singing all my life. I've always wanted this. I sang in church, in school plays, and my parents gave me vocal lessons. My parents always said this was destined for me.

I'll just go over to the Duke's," I said. "Her parents already told me I could stay there. I'll go over there and open all my presents, and talk about how my parents neglect me, and then maybe the Duke will give me some of her presents because she feels so bad about how my mom doesn't love me.

Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children don't need parents' full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.

Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would be quite different. [But] the same goes for the pluralist...If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that...his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process?

I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.

When I was younger, the people making the sacrifice were my parents. It's not a cheap sport. Luckily, I had parents who made a lot of life sacrifices so I could continue in gymnastics.

My parents' selfless affection and dedication nourished and prepared me to receive the love of my guru or spiritual father, Swami Prabhupada. My parents prepared the soil in which my guru sowed the seeds of his compassion.

No matter what job you do, we all have a much different life than our parents had. My parents' generation had one job and then they retired. Now, people have many different jobs.

My parents have always been cool. They even became surrogates to friends of mine who didn't have such supportive parents.

Young men and women come of age when they look at their parents and see them not only as their parents but as people. They gain a lot of compassion, and it's easier to accept their flaws.

I would expect illegal alien parents to take care of their children. If it means the kids go back home with them, that's what happens. If it means there are legal relatives in the United States that can take care of them, that can happen to. But I believe it's the parents responsibility to take care of the kids.

For me, there were a few things in the Spider-Man comics that I thought were really interesting. There's this story about Peter's parents and where he came from, and I thought that it was really interesting to explore the emotional consequence of someone whose parents had left them, at a very young age.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

Kids don’t do what their parents say-they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?

My parents started a business out of the living room of our home and, 30-plus years later, it was a multimillion dollar company. So, President Obama, with all due respect, don't tell me that my parents didn't build their business.

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.

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.

Most people have always done better than their parents, and their parents have done pretty well, and there's always been a sense of expectation or entitlement. It's part of being an American in a sense.

It is hard to stop seeing your son as a son and to start seeing him as a human being. It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings. It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.

Contrary to what we've been told, children can detect deceit in parents much easier than parents can detect deceit in children.

My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.

My parents found what I was interested in and encouraged me. They didn`t put me in front of a television and buy lots of toys, the way some American parents do.