I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.
In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.
For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have...
I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents.
It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.
...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
But now, being a parent, I go home and see my son and I forget about any mistake I ever made or the reason I'm upset. I get home and my son is smiling or he comes running to me. It has just made me grow as an individual and grow as a man.
Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.
And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.
I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
A very painful part of being a parent is having really negative feelings about your children when you love them so much.
What it's like to be a parent: It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.
I think being a parent is knowing how to love. Sometimes love is discipline, sometimes it's humor, sometimes it's listening.
The one thing about being a parent is the ability to be selfless: To give up the things you want and need for the benefit of someone else.
It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawn mower, snowblower and vacuum cleaner.
There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.
If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.
You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
Being a parent is the hardest thing in the world... the psychological toll it takes on you because these lives are in your hands. I take it very seriously.
I think there's a settled quality, there's a gravitas that comes with aging and with being a parent because you certainly come to recognize that there's nothing else that takes greater priority than raising your children.
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