Parent Quotes - Page 15

• The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father's advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.

  Margaret Mead

  Girl, Children, Attitude

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.

  Cleveland Amory

  New York, Men, Boston

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• Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.

  Anna Quindlen

  School, Kids, Connections

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.37, Ballantine Books

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• Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.

  Anna Quindlen

  Memories, Children, Car

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• Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

  Anna Quindlen

  Kids, People, Missing

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• Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me.

  Anna Quindlen

  Responsibility, Men, Cities

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.81, Ballantine Books

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• Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Self, Protection

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• Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Responsibility, Maturity

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.53, Ballantine Books

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• I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called "experts" have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won't take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, "I don't like this advice," the parent won't feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

  Benjamin Spock

  Strong, Jobs, Children

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• Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. I don't refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us.

  Paul Tillich

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Children

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• Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.

  Samuel Beckett

  Achievement, Leaving, Over You

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still”, p.24, Faber & Faber

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• And fathers are a blessing, too, they give the place a tone;
  In fact each child should try and have some parents of its own.

  Louis Untermeyer

  Children, Father, Blessing

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• My fatherhood made me understand my parents and to honor them more for the love they gave. My sonhood was revealed to me in its own perfection and I understood the reason the Chinese so value filiality, the responsibility of the son to honor the parents.

  Kent Nerburn

  Responsibility, Son, Perfection

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• Hopefulness is the heartbeat of the relationship between a parent and child. Each time a child overcomes the next challenge of hislife, his triumph encourages new growth in his parents. In this sense a child is parent to his mother and father.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Mother, Children, Father

  Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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• Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents--these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures--are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Teacher, Real, Avid

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• When a child becomes an adult . . . the elders are fearful. And for good reason . . . not we but they are the germinators of future generations. Will they leave us behind as we did our parents? Consign us to neatly paved retirement villages? Trample us in the dust as they go flying out to their new galaxies? We had better tie them down, flagellate them, isolate them in the family cocoon, . . . indoctrinate them into the tribal laws and make sure they kneel before the power of the elders.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Retirement, Children, Dust

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• We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Maturity, Order, Years

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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• Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Pride, Compassion, Elderly

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• Imagine what it must be like for teenagers who don't feel they have room to breathe in their own homes. If you are a parent reading this book, you care about your child. If she is quirky, unusual, or nonconformist, ask yourself whether you are doing everything you can to nurture her unusual interests, style, or skills, or whether instead you are directly or subtly pushing her to hide them.

  Alexandra Robbins

  Children, Teenager, Book

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• Parents cannot expect advice to have the same force upon their children as experience has upon themselves.

  Samuel Richardson

  Children, Advice, Experience

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• The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Teacher, Children, Struggle

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• Adolescence is a time when children are supposed to move away from parents who are holding firm and protective behind them. When the parents disconnect, the children have no base to move away from or return to. They aren't ready to face the world alone. With divorce, adolescents feel abandoned, and they are outraged at that abandonment. They are angry at both parents for letting them down. Often they feel that their parents broke the rules and so now they can too.

  Mary Pipher

  Children, Moving, Divorce

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• Adolescents' immature thinking makes it difficult for them to process the divorce. They tend to see things in black-and-white terms and have trouble putting events into perspective. They are absolute in their judgments and expect perfection in parents. They are likely to be self-conscious about their parent's failures and critical of their every move. They have the expectations that parents will keep them safe and happy and are shocked by the broken covenant. Adolescents are unforgiving.

  Mary Pipher

  Moving, Divorce, Black And White

  Mary Pipher (2005). “Reviving Ophelia”, p.120, Penguin

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• It's important for parents to watch for trouble and convey to their daughters that, if it comes, they are strong enough to deal with it. Parents who send their [adolescent] daughters the message that they'll be overwhelmed by problems aren't likely to hear what's really happening.

  Mary Pipher

  Daughter, Strong, Important

  Mary Pipher (2005). “Reviving Ophelia”, p.258, Penguin

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• Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.

  Mary Pipher

  Teens, Adolescence

  Mary Pipher (2005). “Reviving Ophelia”, p.21, Penguin

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