Quotes About Parenting

32 quotes

Katharine Hepburn's joke about being a terrible parent, the first time a child disobeys, turns the usual reverence for parenthood on its head. It speaks to the fear of losing control and the impatience behind every well-meaning effort. That honesty makes room for the daily friction of raising children and the failures every parent recognizes.

The theme reaches beyond love and tenderness. It includes frustration and exhaustion, along with quiet surprises that arrive without warning. Umberto Eco saw that character forms in unguarded moments, when parents are not consciously instructing. Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees and concluded that having a child should be fun, a simple observation about delight. Desmond Tutu said that knowing your own story helps you raise a child. Victor Hugo noticed that a mother's goodness shows up in the gaiety of her child.

Hepburn's own contribution is a warning about one's temper. Dale Carnegie offers a ritual of patience, a reminder that the child is just a boy.
English playwright and poet

For your sake, jewel, I am glad at soul I have no other child; For thy escape would teach me tyranny, To hang clogs on them.

— Othello

Russian author

Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

— Anna Karenina

Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

— Foucault's Pendulum

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy.

— Siddhartha

American filmmaker

Daddy, are you going to yell at us some more today?'Neary gazed down into her clear, guileless eyes. That was how he looked to her---a yelling machine. And she was prepared to accept more yelling because she loved him.

— Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Colombian writer and Nobel laureate

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

— Love in the Time of Cholera

Eighth Emperor of Russia, called the Great, r. 1762–1796

One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has a custom them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversation with their teachers.

English author

He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark.

— Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Scottish novelist and poet

To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymes / For love of unforgotten times, And you may chance to hear once more / The little feet along the floor.

— A Child's Garden of Verses

American singer-songwriter

..my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same.

— Chronicles, Vol. 1

President of the United States from 1945 to 1953; politician

My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.

Greek historian and geographer

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

Colombian singer-songwriter

I thank God that I'm a product of my parents. That they infected me with their intelligence and energy for life, with their thirst for knowledge and their love. I'm grateful that I know where I come from.

American singer-songwriter

I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.

King of Macedonia and conqueror of Achaemenid Persia

I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

American singer-songwriter

We're African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

11th and 13th prime minister of Pakistan

My father was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. My grandfather had been in politics, too; however, my own inclination was for a job other than politics. I wanted to be a diplomat, perhaps do some journalism - certainly not politics.