“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.”
Parenting is the most important job you will never feel qualified for. These quotes cover the chaos, joy, worry, and profound love that come with raising another human being — and the humbling realization that your kids are teaching you as much as you teach them.
“A mother who is really a mother is never free.”
“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.”
“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”
“Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?”
“My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.”
“I came to parenting the way most of us do - knowing nothing and trying to learn everything.”
“How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.”
“I think I'm going to have to live vicariously through my daughter's rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence.”
“My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.”
“Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.”
“Relationships are complicated no matter what style of parenting you choose.”
“I barely have time for my own children. To adopt more children and not have time for them, that would be poor parenting on my part.”
“No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.”
“I've become sort of an accidental advocate for attachment parenting, which is a style of parenting that... basically, the way mammals parent and the way people have parented for pretty much all of human history except the last 200 years or so.”
“I'm worried about parents who aren't parenting.”
“The truth is that parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.”