There’s really no point in having children if you’re not going to be home enough to father them.
If you’re asking your kids to exercise, then you better do it, too. Practice what you preach.
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?
Mom and Dad would stay in bed on Sunday morning, but the kids would have to go to church.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think I’m going to have to live vicariously through my daughter’s rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence.
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.
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.
There are 80 million moms in the United States. Forty million stay at home with their children.
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.
Parents forgive their children least readily for the faults they themselves instilled in them.
Having children with someone is the real bond.
I’d just as soon stay home and raise babies.
If you’re financially responsible, your children have a much better chance to grow up financially responsible.
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.
I came to parenting the way most of us do – knowing nothing and trying to learn everything.
There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe.
Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth.
Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity.
Kids are fat because of lack of parenting.
The thing about parenting rules is there aren’t any. That’s what makes it so difficult.
Parenting is the most important thing to many of us, and so it’s also the place we’re most vulnerable. We’re all a little afraid we’re doing it wrong.
