| Author | Quote | Rank |
|---|
| Frederick Douglass | It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.  | 101 |
| Bill Cosby | 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. | 101 |
| Jane D. Hull | At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child's success is the positive involvement of parents. | 101 |
| Lee Strobel | My worldview, my philosophy, my attitudes, my relationships, my parenting, my marriage - everything has been transformed by my relationship with Christ. | 101 |
| Tim Allen | Dad needs to show an incredible amount of respect and humor and friendship toward his mate so the kids understand their parents are sexy, they're fun, they do things together, they're best friends. Kids learn by example. If I respect Mom, they're going to respect Mom. | 101 |
| Virginia Satir | Every word, facial expression, gesture, or action on the part of a parent gives the child some message about self-worth. It is sad that so many parents don't realize what messages they are sending. | 101 |
| Zach Cregger | I think a generation ago, dads went to work, they came home, and they had their dinner, had a drink, and then went to bed. I don't know what it was like in your house, but that is how it was in mine. I think it is cool to have the dads in the trenches and doing the real parenting work. | 101 |
| Taylor Hanson | Having a baby is a life-changer. It gives you a whole other perspective on why you wake up every day. | 101 |
| Todd Tiahrt | Children that are raised in a home with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who come from divorced or step-parent, single-parent, cohabiting homes. | 101 |
| Gena Lee Nolin | My children are the reason I laugh, smile and want to get up every morning. | 101 |
| Polly Berrien Berends | The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving. | 101 |
| Alan Thicke | Family involvement is a valuable thing and playing together actively can be the '90s version of it. Instead of just watching, you can do it together... something we don't spend enough time on. We can motivate and excite each other about fitness. | 101 |
| Anthony Edwards | There's really no point in having children if you're not going to be home enough to father them. | 101 |
| Mel Carnahan | Parents are key when it comes to keeping kids off drugs. Good parenting is the best anti-drug we have. | 101 |
| Ron Taffel | Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride. | 101 |
| Coretta Scott King | Mama and Daddy King represent the best in manhood and womanhood, the best in a marriage, the kind of people we are trying to become. | 102 |
| Ellen Goodman | We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook? | 102 |
| Eliot Spitzer | Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a 'moral hazard,' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again. | 102 |
| Ian Dunbar | Learning from wolves to interact with pet dogs makes about as much sense as, 'I want to improve my parenting - let's see how the chimps do it!' | 102 |
| Robert Fulghum | Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you. | 102 |
| Stevie Nicks | Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings. | 102 |
| Tina Turner | I regret not having had more time with my kids when they were growing up. | 102 |
| Fred G. Gosman | We must return optimism to our parenting. To focus on the joys, not the hassles; the love, not the disappointments; the common sense, not the complexities. | 102 |
| Gordon Neufeld | Many people think that discipline is the essence of parenting. But that isn't parenting. Parenting is not telling your child what to do when he or she misbehaves. Parenting is providing the conditions in which a child can realize his or her full human potential. | 102 |
| John Sculley | We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children. | 102 |
| June Allyson | I'd just as soon stay home and raise babies. | 102 |
| Kamisese Mara | The family teaches us about the importance of knowledge, education, hard work and effort. It teaches us about enjoying ourselves, having fun, keeping fit and healthy. | 102 |
| Luther Burbank | If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed. | 102 |
| Miriam Makeba | Girls are the future mothers of our society, and it is important that we focus on their well-being. | 102 |
| Nadia Boulanger | Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult. | 102 |
| Bob Filner | Childhood obesity is best tackled at home through improved parental involvement, increased physical exercise, better diet and restraint from eating. | 102 |
| Gerald Clayton | A lot of kids have parents who say, 'Music is hard; maybe you should come up with a Plan B.' Whenever I hear that kind of 'advice,' I think it's bad parenting. I was lucky to have a parent who assured me it was a possibility to pursue music. | 102 |
| Kelly LeBrock | Success for me its to raise happy, healthy human beings. | 102 |
| Polly Berrien Berends | Parenthood always comes as a shock. Postpartum blues? Postpartum panic is more like it. We set out to have a baby; what we get is a total take-over of our lives. | 102 |
| Dale Archer | Parenting classes should be mandatory, whether you are adopting or not, and would include an evaluation of your current physical, mental and financial state as well as how ready you are to take on the rigors of parenthood. Our children are our most precious natural resource, and there is absolutely no other way to parent but to put them first. | 102 |
| Louise Hart | The Golden Rule of Parenting is; do unto your children as you wish your parents had done unto you! | 102 |
| Jourdan Dunn | The unconditional love for you child, it's truly amazing. | 102 |
| Michael Spence | My father once said about being a parent that it is the only thing you do that requires a very long period of learning, and at about the time that you are becoming competent, you don't need the skills anymore. Notwithstanding this modest assessment of their parenting skills, they were wonderful parents. | 102 |
| Marjorie Holmes | What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp. | 102 |
| Milton Sapirstein | Education, like neurosis, begins at home. | 102 |
| Ben Carson | There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe. | 103 |
| Henry Ward Beecher | We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves. | 103 |
| Alvin Toffler | Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur. | 103 |
| Anne Sullivan | It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things. | 103 |
| Benjamin Spock | 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. | 103 |
| Caitlyn Jenner | If you're asking your kids to exercise, then you better do it, too. Practice what you preach. | 103 |
| Frank A. Clark | A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it. | 103 |
| Tim McGraw | I have three daughters, so I can't be as tough as I want to be. When you have kids - especially daughters - they know how to work you. They're a lot smarter than we are, that's for sure. But I'll be more tough on their boyfriends. | 103 |
| Cindy Crawford | I believe that at least 70 percent of parenting goes to the mother. In our house, I'm the one who knows about all the school stuff, helps with the homework, organizes the play dates, and remembers the birthday parties. | 103 |
| Clive Owen | Parenthood and family come first for me, and when I'm not working I'm cool with the Teletubbies. | 103 |
| Mayim Bialik | Relationships are complicated no matter what style of parenting you choose. | 103 |
| Robert Webb | Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options. | 103 |
| Barry Humphries | I've decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect. | 103 |
| Emma McLaughlin | As a rule, I try to steer clear of opinions pertaining to your parenting. I assume you're doing the best you can, and God bless. | 103 |
| Robbie Coltrane | Believe me, my children have more stamina than a power station. | 103 |
| Martin Mull | Having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. | 103 |
| Sarah Clarke | Being a mother of two myself - and two small girls - I think that single parenting is hard. | 103 |
| Matthew Broderick | Having a baby changes the way you view your in-laws. I love it when they come to visit now. They can hold the baby and I can go out. | 103 |
| Phil McGraw | The Internet is just bringing all kinds of information into the home. There's just a lot of distraction, a lot of competition for the parent's voice to resonate in the children's ears. | 104 |
| Charles R. Swindoll | Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children. | 104 |
| James E. Faust | To be a good father and mother requires that the parents defer many of their own needs and desires in favor of the needs of their children. As a consequence of this sacrifice, conscientious parents develop a nobility of character and learn to put into practice the selfless truths taught by the Savior Himself. | 104 |
| Nancy Jo Sales | I'm not a parenting expert by any means, but I've been interviewing and writing about kids for almost 20 years. | 104 |
| Nathaniel Branden | Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life. | 104 |
| Robert Orben | I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home. | 104 |
| Allan Bloom | Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. | 104 |
| Arlie Russell Hochschild | In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage. | 104 |
| Roy L. Smith | We are apt to forget that children watch examples better than they listen to preaching. | 104 |
| Drew Lachey | I have this blanket thing about giving parenting advice to parents, and that's: 'Don't take other people's advice on parenting.' | 104 |
| Gilbert Highet | The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching. | 104 |
| Muriel Spark | Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life. | 104 |
| Tim Huelskamp | Some men don't want to be responsible fathers. It's easier to say 'Let's just turn the kids over to the state.' Women end up bearing the entire load, raising kids alone without a husband to share the parenting. | 104 |
| Jill Clayburgh | I wasn't very good about juggling family and my career. I was interested in who was coming to the children's birthday party, what my son was writing. I was thinking about Legos. | 104 |
| Jackie Kennedy | If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much. | 105 |
| Jim Gaffigan | As a dad, you are the Vice President of the executive branch of parenting. It doesn't matter what your personality is like, you will always be Al Gore to your wife's Bill Clinton. She feels the pain and you are the annoying nerd telling them to turn off the lights. | 105 |
| Arlie Russell Hochschild | No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach. | 105 |
| Charles J. Shields | Edith Vonnegut behaved like a guest in her children's lives. To her way of thinking, parenting came under the general heading of household tasks, which, as a wealthy woman, she could pay others to do. | 105 |
| Connie Sellecca | You have to support your children to have a healthy relationship. | 105 |
| Emily Oster | The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows. | 105 |
| Mayim Bialik | I came to parenting the way most of us do - knowing nothing and trying to learn everything. | 105 |
| Joan Cusack | I take parenting incredibly seriously. I want to be there for my kids and help them navigate the world, and develop skills, emotional intelligence, to enjoy life, and I'm lucky to be able to do that and have two healthy, normal boys. | 105 |
| Lisa Whelchel | I'm hosting weekend retreats all over America. It is like a 24-hour slumber party for moms. We laugh, eat, play games, get massages, win prizes, talk about parenting and even cry a bit. | 105 |
| Robbie Coltrane | My kids love it. I thought I was the coolest dad in the world when I got to be in a Bond film, but 'Harry Potter', too? Well, I think I qualify for a medal for exceptional parenting or something, don't you? | 105 |
| Simon Van Booy | Single parenting is sometimes just a case of sitting around by yourself in mild despair, not knowing what to do. | 105 |
| Stephen Mangan | Dad was a strict disciplinarian and would give us a wallop with a wooden spoon if we were out of order. But we really respected him - he didn't try to be our best friend. | 105 |
| Joan Lunden | I had three children while doing a show, as demanding as 'Good Morning America,' so this is - you know, it's almost like I'm less daunted about motherhood, and parenting at this point in time. And I think I'm just much more fit and healthy than I was 20-years-ago. | 105 |
| John H. Johnson | My mother was the influence in my life. She was strong; she had great faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and hard work. She believed passionately in education. | 105 |
| Justin Chatwin | I really like 'Shameless' because it brings up important issues, but we get to talk and laugh and look at something that's really important that's a problem, like alcoholism and bad parenting. It's done in a funny, smart way. | 105 |
| Denis Waitley | Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision. | 106 |
| Jamie Lee Curtis | The most rewarding aspect of parenting is seeing my children be authentic. The most rewarding thing for me is to see them do anything that they're proud of. | 106 |
| Anna Quindlen | Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules. | 106 |
| Ben Stein | Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child's tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny. | 106 |
| Edie Falco | We're living in a time when parenting is not at all mirroring the way I was parented. For me, I just followed my parents around on their errands; when they were busy on the phone, I was quiet. It's a different kettle of fish these days: They run the house, and you listen to their music, and you go to their appointments. | 106 |
| Ellen Key | At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses. | 106 |
| Richard Louv | Leave part of the yard rough. Don't manicure everything. Small children in particular love to turn over rocks and find bugs, and give them some space to do that. Take your child fishing. Take your child on hikes. | 106 |
| Virginia Satir | What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting. | 106 |
| Eric McCormack | I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older. | 106 |
| Mayim Bialik | 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. | 106 |
| Robert Casey | Abortion is defended today as a means of ensuring the equality and independence of women, and as a solution to the problems of single parenting, child abuse, and the feminization of poverty. | 106 |
| Anthony Edwards | It's difficult to keep that perspective, I think, as a parent: to know your boundaries as to what's good parenting or just projecting your own expectations on your kids. That's the hardest. | 106 |
| Dale Archer | We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don't give alcohol to kids. | 106 |
| Benjamin Spock | The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering. | 107 |
| Padma Lakshmi | In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends. | 107 |
| Beverly Cleary | 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. | 107 |
| Mayim Bialik | Attachment parenting is not a passive parenting style. | 107 |
| Nelly | I think parenting these days is definitely different from when a lot of people grew up. As much blame as we give a lot of our kids for what they're not doing... I also try to give them as much credit for dealing with things that we didn't have to deal with. Bullying was one on one and face to face. Now it's all over the Internet. | 107 |
| Andrew J. Bernstein | The number of stressors has multiplied exponentially: traffic, money, success, work/life balance, the economy, the environment, parenting, family conflict, relationships, disease. As the nature of human life has become far more complicated, our ancient stress response hasn't been able to keep up. | 107 |
| Susie Bright | I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood. | 107 |
| Todd Tiahrt | The well-being and welfare of children should always be our focus. | 107 |
| Clyde Edgerton | A parentologist is a person who writes a book about parenting that is very clear about answers to, 'How am I supposed to raise my child?' Some of these well-intentioned people may be a bit too sure-footed on the sometimes slippery slope of parenting. | 107 |
| Reese Witherspoon | I feel very blessed to have two wonderful, healthy children who keep me completely grounded, sane and throw up on my shoes just before I go to an awards show just so I know to keep it real. | 108 |
| Sebastian Coe | Nobody ever becomes an expert parent. But I think good parenting is about consistency. It's about being there at big moments, but it's also just the consistency of decision making. And it's routine. | 108 |
| Norma Shearer | I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin. | 108 |
| Ryan Phillippe | I grew up with no money. My kids will grow up with a lot of money and so it's really important to me, and it will always be a part of my parenting, to keep them conscientious and connected socially to other people. | 108 |
| Ariel Gore | When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence. | 108 |
| Robert Cormier | Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there. | 108 |
| Marion Jones | My father wasn't really involved and my mom is the light in my life. | 108 |
| Robert Evans | When a parent shows up with an attitude of entitlement, understand that under it is a boatload of anxiety. | 108 |
| Barbara Bush | I'm worried about parents who aren't parenting. | 109 |
| Christopher Morley | We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up. | 109 |
| Ewan McGregor | Giving kids whatever they ask for is disastrous parenting. There's no sense of something earned. I'm sorry, but when you're 12, you don't need a new cell phone every few months just because a new one comes out. | 109 |
| Laura Schlessinger | Children are our second chance to have a great parent-child relationship. | 109 |
| Carl Honore | Everywhere, people are discovering that doing things more slowly often means doing them better and enjoying them more. It means living life instead of rushing through it. You can apply this to everything from food to parenting to work. | 109 |
| Steffi Graf | I suppose it's amazing how quick life goes by when you have children. | 109 |
| Gloria Swanson | I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents. | 110 |
| Kym Whitley | My parenting style is probably like that of my parents, because you do how you learn. My mother was very nurturing and loving, but very stern. She was a disciplinary. My dad was also very loving. | 110 |
| Mitt Romney | My mom and dad gave their kids the greatest gift of all - the gift of unconditional love. They cared deeply about who we would be, and much less about what we would do. | 110 |
| Olivia Newton-John | To me luxury is to be at home with my daughter, and the occasional massage doesn't hurt. | 110 |
| Temple Grandin | Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments. | 110 |
| Hector Elizondo | I'm a parent, especially when you've had the intense parenting the way I had. It's all in the bank. It's all in the great experience bank. Those are your secrets. That's the stuff that makes your work rich, that's what you dip into. | 110 |
| John Boehner | Studies show that children best flourish when one mom and one dad are there to raise them. | 110 |
| Bob Barr | For decades, parents were told by so-called parenting 'experts' that offspring would be best raised on the belief each is special and entitled to all life has to offer. | 110 |
| Jillian Michaels | Parenting is not for sissies. You have to sacrifice and grow up. | 110 |
| Michael Showalter | For me, Twitter works best as a way of taking pictures of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. If people really want to read really funny quips about life, parenting, and pop culture, then by all means read Michael Ian Black's tweets. | 110 |
| Melissa Rivers | Parenting a pre-teen is quite something. | 110 |
| Jane Kaczmarek | You can make sure your kids make their beds and hang up their clothes and put their dishes in the dishwasher when you're the one calling the shots. So, parenting alone, for me anyway, I think is almost easier, being single. | 110 |
| David Frost | Love is staying up all night with a sick child - or a healthy adult. | 111 |
| Franklin P. Jones | You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. | 111 |
| James Dobson | Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built. | 111 |
| H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they're already asleep. | 112 |
| Christy Turlington | Parents should not smoke in order to discourage their kids from smoking. A child is more likely to smoke when they have been raised in the environment of a smoker. | 112 |
| Eddie Vedder | I'm trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived. | 112 |
| Kenny G | That's my ideal day, time with my boys. | 112 |
| Roberto Benigni | My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity. | 112 |
| Susan Cain | Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them. Parenting can pose unique challenges for introverted parents, who fear that their own painful experiences will be repeated in their children's lives. | 112 |
| Ayelet Waldman | There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature. | 112 |
| Bruce Feiler | Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive. | 112 |
| Lynn Johnston | Mom and Dad would stay in bed on Sunday morning, but the kids would have to go to church. | 112 |
| Jenna Morasca | Loving and parenting a dog as a single parent can create all sorts of new and unusual problems, but also new sources of joy. | 112 |
| Andrew Shue | There are 80 million moms in the United States. Forty million stay at home with their children. | 112 |
| Marcelene Cox | No one knows his true character until he has run out of gas, purchased something on the installment plan and raised an adolescent. | 112 |
| Princess Diana | Hugs can do great amounts of good - especially for children. | 113 |
| Jamie Lee Curtis | The challenging part of parenting for me is to make sure that an individual person is an individual and not some sort of cookie-cutter version of me. At the same time, I want to make sure that I impart my sense of the world as an adult. | 113 |
| Benjamin Spock | What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all. | 113 |
| Pat Conroy | I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.' | 113 |
| Clive Owen | Very often when you see families it's all perfect and neat, and parenting isn't like that. You do have constant negotiations. Things are ever developing and ever changing, and you constantly have to evaluate how you deal with your kids. | 113 |
| Tori Spelling | I thought that once we were out of the baby stage, parenting would be a breeze. | 113 |
| Pauline Phillips | It is a sad commentary of our times when our young must seek advice and counsel from 'Dear Abby' instead of going to Mom and Dad. | 113 |
| Garrison Keillor | Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted. | 114 |
| Liam Neeson | 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. | 114 |
| Patricia Heaton | It's hard enough to work and raise a family when your kids are all healthy and relatively normal, but when you add on some kind of disability or disease, it can just be such a burden. | 114 |
| Alan Arkin | No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you're gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can't do parenting right. | 114 |
| Evan Bayh | Mothers - especially single mothers - are heroic in their efforts to raise our nation's children, but men must also take responsibility for their children and recognize the impact they have on their families' well-being. | 114 |
| Martin Jacques | My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality. | 114 |
| Sloane Crosley | Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons? | 114 |
| Alison Gopnik | I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them. | 115 |
| Michele Bachmann | My parents were divorced when I was a young teenager, and I was raised by a single mother after that. So, I understand the difficulties that families have. I understand single parenting. | 115 |
| Jessica Valenti | I think that the ideal of parenting can make people unhappy. It's that this lie that they're being told by society that parenting is one thing - and when parenting is something completely different - that's what makes them unhappy. | 115 |
| Amy Chua | Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done. I tried to find the balance between the strict, traditional Chinese way I was raised, which I think can be too harsh, and what I see as a tendency in the West to be too permissive and indulgent. If I could do it all again, I would, with some adjustments. | 116 |
| Doug Larson | Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own. | 116 |
| Henry Reed | If there is any truth to my parenting the dreamwork movement, it comes from the power of the press. | 116 |
| Craig T. Nelson | Being a father of three children and grandfather to nine, I do think that this thing called 'parenting' is becoming increasingly difficult. | 116 |
| Francesca Annis | Having children with someone is the real bond. | 117 |
| Harry Connick, Jr. | I think a dad has to make his daughter feel that he's genuinely interested in what she's going through. | 117 |
| Helen Hayes | Childhood is a short season. | 117 |
| Robert Orben | Never raise your hand to your children - it leaves your midsection unprotected. | 117 |
| Amy Chua | Happiness is not always through success. Equally, the constant pursuit of success is sure unhappiness. But we have to find the balance. My own thoughts are that parenting is very personal. And we all feel enormous insecurity about parenting. What are they going to think of us 20 years down the line? | 117 |
| Debra Winger | I hope to find the roles that are age appropriate but not yearning to be younger, or parenting ad nauseam. | 117 |
| Russell Baker | Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it. | 117 |
| Liane Moriarty | We all, as parents, are laughing at ourselves and helicopter parenting and saying, 'This isn't the way we were parented; we were allowed to run free.' When I talk to my friends, we are all fascinated by what we are doing, but we can't seem to stop ourselves. | 117 |
| Juhi Chawla | Parenting now is a two-way relationship where you learn from each other. | 117 |
| Billy Graham | A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone. | 118 |
| Hanna Rosin | Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. | 118 |
| Rose Kennedy | When you hold your baby in your arms the first time, and you think of all the things you can say and do to influence him, it's a tremendous responsibility. What you do with him can influence not only him, but everyone he meets and not for a day or a month or a year but for time and eternity. | 118 |
| Roseanne Barr | As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I've done my job. | 118 |
| Adam Mansbach | We had a kid. The kid was awesome. She didn't fall asleep easily. We complained about it. We got frustrated. But we didn't look for an out. We just accepted that this was part of parenting. | 118 |
| Ezekiel Emanuel | There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it 'jazz parenting.' | 119 |
| Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach | Parents forgive their children least readily for the faults they themselves instilled in them. | 119 |
| Ogden Nash | Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore. | 119 |
| Tamora Pierce | I come from a dysfunctional family, so my views of parents and parenting used to be highly mixed. | 119 |
| Sigmund Freud | I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection. | 120 |
| Regina Brett | The secret to success, to parenting, to life, is to not count up the cost. Don't focus on all the steps it will take. Don't stare into the abyss at the giant leap it will take. That view will keep you from taking the next small step. | 120 |
| Meghan Daum | People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that. | 120 |
| Bill O'Reilly | The government cannot overcome bad parenting. What our leaders can do is publicly condemn irresponsible parental behavior in vivid terms. | 121 |
| Ewan McGregor | The thing about parenting rules is there aren't any. That's what makes it so difficult. | 121 |
| Hugh Jackman | Becoming a father, I think it inevitably changes your perspective of life. I don't get nearly enough sleep. And the simplest things in life are completely satisfying. I find you don't have to do as much, like you don't go on as many outings. | 121 |
| Meryl Streep | The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter. | 121 |
| Amy Chua | You know, parenting is so personal. And we're all afraid that we didn't quite get it right. And it feels like the stakes are so high. By we - what if we made a mistake? | 121 |
| Conrad Anker | I learned that life is about the people around you and the people you give back to. That's what parenting is: You're not there for yourself; you're there for your offspring and everyone else around you. | 121 |
| Rob Delaney | I'm endlessly fascinated by parenting, marriage, my wife and the ins and outs of marriage. | 121 |
| Quentin Crisp | My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. | 122 |
| Cindy Crawford | It's a huge change for your body. You don't even want to look in the mirror after you've had a baby, because your stomach is just hanging there like a Shar-Pei. | 122 |
| Julia Cameron | We go into parenting, and we discover that we don't have the answers. We are at a loss. | 122 |
| Jodi Benson | I can only speak for my husband and myself, but we don't feel like we could do any of this parenting without our faith. | 122 |
| Emily Oster | I think we've moved to thinking of parenting and pregnancy as something in which you should lose yourself. | 123 |
| Dave Morris | Some have said that 'Frankenstein' is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child. | 123 |
| LZ Granderson | I don't claim to know everything about parenting, but I do know parents do their children a disservice by constantly sugarcoating their shortcomings to protect their feelings. | 124 |
| Brene Brown | If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people's choices. If I feel good about my body, I don't go around making fun of other people's weight or appearance. We're hard on each other because we're using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency. | 125 |
| Emma Thompson | Indeed - judicious, consistent parenting is a dream of mine. No judgements, learning space and listening carefully are my goals. | 125 |
| Tori Amos | Parenting is not for everybody. It changes your life. Especially when they're little. | 126 |
| Shawn Amos | In Los Angeles, parenting is a competitive sport. From Beverly Hills baby boutiques to kids' yoga classes, L.A. fuses high style, industrial-strength materialism, and parental outsourcing into our own unique version of child-rearing. | 126 |
| Adam Mansbach | When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn't really about disapproval; it's about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent. | 126 |
| Jessica Valenti | The truth about parenting is that the reality of our lives needs to be enough. | 126 |
| Carl Honore | To me, Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms. | 201 |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. | 202 |
| Carl Honore | Slow parents understand that childrearing should not be a cross between a competitive sport and product-development. It is not a project; it's a journey. Slow parenting is about giving kids lots of love and attention with no conditions attached. | 202 |
| Mayim Bialik | I have a neuroscience background - that's what my doctorate is in - and I was trained to study hormones of attachment, so I definitely feel my parenting is informed by that. | 202 |
| Josie Bissett | I'm doing a lot of parenting work and acting as a spokesperson. I have a clothing line and a line of toys. | 202 |
| Uma Thurman | So, you know, parenting is a very intimate and amazing experience and one of the best experiences of my life. | 203 |
| Brooke Shields | I think I'm going to have to live vicariously through my daughter's rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence. | 203 |
| Marlee Matlin | What parent has it easy? I just never make the difficulty of it an obstacle. I just do it. | 204 |
| Walter Scott | 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. | 204 |
| Stacey D'Erasmo | I'm not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges - which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it. | 204 |
| Jonathan Safran Foer | Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting. | 204 |
| Carl Jung | Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk. | 205 |
| Joyce Meyer | Don't judge other people. For example, if you want God's anointing to be on you for parenting, you need to be careful not to criticize other parents. | 205 |
| Mika Brzezinski | I realize that of all people, I am no expert on parenting or marriage. | 205 |
| Alan Alda | I've been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you're not expecting it. | 206 |
| Erma Bombeck | Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth. | 207 |
| Carl Honore | Smaller families mean we have more time and money to lavish on each child. Parents are more anxious because small families give them less experience of parenting and put their genetic eggs in fewer baskets. | 207 |
| Phyllis Diller | Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going. | 208 |
| Bernie Siegel | 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. | 208 |
| Tamsin Greig | I have a shallow understanding of what it means to be alive, and I know certain things about parenting and being a wife and doing the school run. I know little bits, but I'm really a paddler on a beach. | 208 |
| Amy Chua | I sort of feel like people are not that honest about their own parenting. Take any teenage household; tell me there is not yelling and conflict. | 208 |
| Matthew Perry | I would love to have kids one day. In fact, I'm pretty good with them. I grew up with five half-siblings, the youngest of whom is 11 years younger than me, so I think I learned some pretty cool parenting skills quite early on in life. | 208 |
| Sundar Pichai | Should kids check phones at dinner? I don't know. To me, that's a parenting choice. | 208 |
| Sloane Crosley | 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. | 209 |
| Adam Mansbach | Sleeping is one of the more private aspects of parenting; it happens in a quiet room, whereas eating is a more public aspect of parenting. Other people can see it and compare it to what their kids eat. | 209 |
| Plato | Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence. | 210 |
| P. J. O'Rourke | Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them. | 210 |
| Miguel de Cervantes | No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly. | 210 |
| Adam Mansbach | It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert. | 210 |
| Bill O'Reilly | Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation. | 211 |
| Virginia Postrel | The children who are 'our future' will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting. | 211 |
| Audre Lorde | I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community. | 212 |
| Steven Spielberg | I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild. | 212 |
| Dennis Miller | Parenting is the most important job on the planet next to keeping Gary Busey off the nation's highways. | 212 |
| Kourtney Kardashian | I love to read books that focus on parenting topics because there are so many different ways to do things. I find these books offer a lot of great opinions on many different subjects. | 212 |
| Amy Chua | Tiger parenting is all about raising independent, creative, courageous kids. In America today, there's a dangerous tendency to romanticize creativity in a way that may undermine it. | 213 |
| John F. Kennedy | Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process. | 215 |
| Alison Gopnik | The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways. | 215 |
| Brene Brown | The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror. | 216 |
| Kristin Armstrong | Whether I'm running, working, relating, parenting, learning - whatever I'm doing, I want to surround myself with people who push me. | 216 |
| Sarah Jessica Parker | I love, love, love being an actor - it's still the hardest and scariest thing I do, outside of parenting. But I've always been someone who likes a busy day. | 216 |
| Adam Davidson | I'm not the first to admit that raising a child in Park Slope, Brooklyn, can bear an embarrassing resemblance to the TV show 'Portlandia.' My wife and I try to have some ironic distance from the culture of organic, chemical-free parenting, but we're often participants. | 216 |
| Brene Brown | Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children. | 217 |
| Stephen Colbert | That's my parenting style - 'Go watch the TV.' I'm one of 11 children, and my mother's parenting style was, 'There's the TV. Go watch it. Mommy's got 10 other people to take care of.' | 217 |
| Bruce Feiler | I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book. | 217 |
| Harrison Ford | Parenting is an impossible job at any age. | 218 |
| Dawn French | My approach to parenting is that everything is open - everything. I'm not very good at covert, or subtle, and I've had to learn timing. I do blunder in a bit. | 220 |
| Paul Walker | Thing is, I went to a born-again Christian high school, was brought up in a traditional Mormon family where these ideas about parenting are of structure and sacrifice. To think outside of that idea of family and parenting that I've grown up with is tough but also very freeing. | 220 |
| Bill Cosby | 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. | 221 |
| George Will | Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children. | 221 |
| Wylie Dufresne | Being a chef isn't the ideal career to intersect with parenting, but I try to be in my kids' lives as much as possible. | 221 |
| Jane Fonda | 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. | 221 |
| Robert Winston | I think that good parenting should allow children to be children. That naivety and slightly open way of looking at the world is very valuable. | 222 |
| Jennifer Aniston | Of course, the ideal scenario for parenting is obviously two parents of a mature age. | 224 |
| Gary Oldman | There's no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, 'We're gonna have to clean that up because you don't paint with coffee on a table.' | 301 |
| Mary J. Blige | 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. | 301 |
| Brene Brown | 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. | 302 |
| Chelsea Clinton | My parents were definitely on the incentive side of parenting. Like, they told me that my father had learned to read when he was three. So, of course, I thought I had to, too. | 304 |
| Gloria Steinem | Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father. | 305 |
| Amy Chua | I do not think there was anything abusive in my house. Yet, I stand by a lot of my critiques of Western parenting. I think there's a lot of questions about how you instill true self-esteem. | 306 |
| Amy Chua | To be honest, I know that a lot of Asian parents are secretly shocked and horrified by many aspects of Western parenting. | 308 |
| Brene Brown | My husband's a pediatrician, so he and I talk about parenting all the time. You can't raise children who have more shame resilience than you do. | 309 |
| Jennifer Aniston | Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. | 309 |
| Bernie Mac | I want to speak directly to the audience, to say, 'I'm like you - I'm frustrated, I'm not an expert, I don't have a manual on parenting, I make mistakes, I'm selfish too.' | 310 |
| Amy Chua | I think there are many ways to raise great kids. From what I can tell, Ayelet Waldman's kids are interesting, strong, and happy, and if that's the case, that's good parenting. | 310 |
| Rita Rudner | I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours. | 311 |
| Helen Fisher | If two very different people pool their DNA, they'll create more genetic variety, and their young will come to the job of parenting with a wider array of skills. | 313 |
| Fiona Apple | No, I've never wanted kids. But I do read about parenting a lot. | 317 |
| Erica Jong | Women are individuals in parenting, and why not? | 323 |
| James E. Faust | We learn much of parenting from our own parents. My love for my father deepened profoundly when he was kind, patient, and understanding. | 401 |
| Honore de Balzac | A mother who is really a mother is never free. | 406 |
| Martin Jacques | In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging. | 406 |
| Alanis Morissette | My son was five months old, and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house. | 408 |
| Kourtney Kardashian | I am always trying to evolve, so I like to read parenting books and things like that. | 408 |
| Suze Orman | If you're financially responsible, your children have a much better chance to grow up financially responsible. | 408 |
| Christie Brinkley | My work makes me a better mom. It gives me a little door to step out of my parenting and bring the excitement from my day back home. | 409 |
| Stephen Curry | You learn that there's no right way to do it, no wrong way to do it. It's just what you feel comfortable with, to trust that, and don't let anybody box you in to a certain style of parenting or make you feel a certain way about what your kids do. | 410 |
| Helena Bonham Carter | The parenting bit is much harder than the acting bit. You just never know what to do. | 412 |
| Nicholas Kristof | Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life. | 415 |
| Ben Shapiro | Kids are fat because of lack of parenting. | 416 |
| Lewis Black | Parenting isn't just parenting your own child. | 501 |
| Shakira | Gerard and I pretty much share all parenting responsibilities, although I'm definitely the disciplinarian. | 510 |
| P. J. O'Rourke | Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree. | 516 |
| Monica Johnson | From politics to parenting, Christians have something to say. | 518 |
| George Bernard Shaw | Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children. | 620 |
| Andy Serkis | I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children! | 711 |
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