Parent Quotes - Page 16

• Most parents of adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow up and explore the world. The parents' job is to protect, the daughter's job is to explore.

  Mary Pipher

  Girl, Daughter, Jobs

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• The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.... The emotionally satisfying discussions that take place in Chronic Pain Outreach and Depression Resources are simply updated versions of the grandmotherly practice of hanging crepe. We could eliminate much of the isolation that support groups exist to fill and save the "traditional family" that everybody is so worried about if more couples took their aging parents to live with them.

  Florence King

  Growing Up, Couple, Pain

  20 Copy quote

• For a parent, it's hard to recognize the significance of your work when you're immersed in the mundane details. Few of us, as we run the bath water or spread the peanut butter on the bread, proclaim proudly, "I'm making my contribution to the future of the planet." But with the exception of global hunger, few jobs in the world of paychecks and promotions compare in significance to the job of parent.

  Joyce Maynard

  Running, Jobs, Water

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• One of the sad realities of being a parent is that the same stuff you know is exciting, educational, and enriching in your child'slife is often messy, smelly and exhausting to deal with.

  Joyce Maynard

  Children, Educational, Reality

  5 Copy quote

• Parents offer an open womb. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can kiss it, and make it well whentheir grown children need to regress and repair. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can catch you when you start to fall. When you are in disgrace, defeat, and despair, home may be the safest place to hide.

  Frank Pittman

  Mother, Children, Father

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• We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside ourskin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes--and knows it.

  Frank Pittman

  Wise, Strong, Growing Up

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• The child who would be an adult must give up any lingering childlike sense of parental power, either the magical ability to solveyour problems for you or the dreaded ability to make you turn back into a child. When you are no longer hiding from your parents, or clinging to them, and can accept them as fellow human beings, then they may do the same for you.

  Frank Pittman

  Children, Giving Up, Growing Up

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• Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a couple of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band.

  Frank Pittman

  Couple, Cheer, Brass Bands

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• Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes.

  Frank Pittman

  Way, Showing Up, Toes

  "How to Manage Mom & Dad" by Frank Pittman, www.psychologytoday.com. November 1, 1994.

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• Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, andwhat circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.

  Frank Pittman

  Years, Creating, Effort

  7 Copy quote

• Some parents were awful back then and are awful still. The process of raising you didn't turn them into grown-ups. Parents who were clearly imperfect can be helpful to you. As you were trying to grow up despite their fumbling efforts, you had to develop skills and tolerances other kids missed out on. Some of the strongest people I know grew up taking care of inept, invalid, or psychotic parents--but they know the parents weren't normal, healthy, or whole.

  Frank Pittman

  Growing Up, Kids, Skills

  18 Copy quote

• In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has hadless authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Home, Past

  7 Copy quote

• Parents have to get over the idea that their children belong just to them; children are a family affair.

  Frank Pittman

  Family, Children, Ideas

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• In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives.

  Frank Pittman

  Children, Opportunity, Giving

  "How to Manage Mom & Dad" by Frank Pittman, www.psychologytoday.com. November 1, 1994.

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• Negotiating the adolescent stage is neither quick nor easy. . . . I have often said to parents, "If it isn't illegal, immoral, orfattening, give it your blessing." We do much better . . . if we find and support all the places we can appropriately say yes, and say only the no's that really matter.

  Virginia Satir

  Blessing, Giving, Support

  9 Copy quote

• Parents teach in the toughest school in the word: The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, theclassroom teacher, and the janitor, all rolled into two. . . . There are few schools to train you for your job, and there is no general agreement on the curriculum. . . . You are on duty, or at least on call, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for at least 18 years for each child you have. Besides that, you have to contend with an administration that has two leaders or bosses, whichever the case may be.

  Virginia Satir

  Teacher, Jobs, Children

  44 Copy quote

• 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.

  Virginia Satir

  Hurt, Jobs, Children

  65 Copy quote

• The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Distance, Home, College

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• Parents have no right to impose their religion on their children... A Fundamentalist Protestant parent has no right to expect the state to support his own narrow conception of education.

  Paul Kurtz

  Christian, Religious, Children

  Paul Kurtz “Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz”, Transaction Publishers

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• I'M HOPEFUL, because I know that while we still have race issues in America, we enjoy a much different normal than those of our parents and grandparents. I see it in my personal relationships with teammates, friends and mentors. And it's a beautiful thing.

  Benjamin Watson

  Beautiful, Race, America

  Benjamin Watson (2015). “Under Our Skin: Getting Real about Race. Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations that Divide Us.”, p.16, NavPress

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• There are many things children accept as "grown-up things" over when they have no control and for which they have no responsibility--for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents' decision to live apart.

  Fred Rogers

  Baby, Children, Divorce

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• Parents who expect change in themselves as well as in their children, who accept it and find in it the joy as well as the pains ofgrowth, are likely to be the happiest and most confident parents.

  Fred Rogers

  Children, Pain, Joy

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• I don't believe that children can develop in a healthy way unless they feel that they have value apart from anything they own or any skill that they learn. They need to feel they enhance the life of someone else, that they are needed. Who, better than parents, can let them know that?

  Fred Rogers

  Children, Believe, Skills

  Fred Rogers (1995). “You Are Special: Words of Wisdom for All Ages from a Beloved Neighbor”, p.98, Penguin

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• Love is at the root of all healthy discipline. The desire to be loved is a powerful motivation for children to behave in ways thatgive their parents pleasure rather than displeasure. it may even be our own long-ago fear of losing our parents' love that now sometimes makes us uneasy about setting and maintaining limits. We're afraid we'll lose the love of our children when we don't let them have their way.

  Fred Rogers

  Children, Motivation, Powerful

  Fred Rogers (1995). “You Are Special: Words of Wisdom for All Ages from a Beloved Neighbor”, p.68, Penguin

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• And those handmade presents that children often bring home from school: They have so much value! The value is that the child put whatever he or she could into making them. The way we parents respond to the giving of such gifts is very important. To the child the gift is really self, and they want so much for their selves to be acceptable, to be loved.

  Fred Rogers

  Children, Home, School

  7 Copy quote