Quotes on Children & Parenting
Opinionated quotations from the famous and not-so-famous.

Having children makes one no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

Michael Levine

The brain has the consistency of soft butter, custard, tofu—somewhere between egg whites and JELL-O. That's why we shouldn't let children hit soccer balls with their head, and football is a dangerous brain sport, as boxing is, obviously.

Daniel G. Amen, M.D. (from The Early Show on CBS, October 11, 2005)

You want to be a parent? Shut up and do your job.

'Dr. Robert Romano' from E.R. (Oct. 18, 2001)

Most of us became parents long before we have stopped being children.

Mignon McLaughlin

Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.

Elias Canetti

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

Samuel Butler

Parents are not quite interested in justice, they are interested in quiet.

Bill Cosby

The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.

Jim Morrison

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.

Dr. Jess Lair

The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Bertrand Russell

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Kahlil Gibran

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

Plato

Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion.

Terence

The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard.

John Lennon

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jesse Jackson

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham H. Maslow

Train the parent and spare the child.

Duane Alan Hahn

Children need models rather than critics.

Joseph Joubert

Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.

Lady Bird Johnson

A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today.

Thomas Gray

What is done to children, they will do to society.

Karl A. Menninger

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.

Harold S. Hubert

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

Phyllis Diller

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself.

Josh Billings

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

James Baldwin

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Dr. Wayne Dyer

Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.

Albert Einstein

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.

Franklin P. Jones

Children need guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Anne Sullivan

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

Oscar Wilde

Many things can wait; the child cannot. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his mind is being developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow; his name is today.

Gabriela Mistral

The first duty to children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that.

Charles Buxton

You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth.

Kahlil Gibran

Love gives all and requires nothing.

God from Conversations with God (Book 2) through Neale Donald Walsch

Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.

Gerald Brenan

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Harry S. Truman

Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision.

Denis Waitley

The best training any parent can give a child is to train the child to train himself.

A. P. Gouthey

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed, saying: ''There is life, but it's not for you.''

John Mortimer

We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.

John Holt (adapted)

One must marvel at the intellectual quality of a teacher who can't understand why children assault one another in the hallway, playground, and city street, when in the classroom the highest accolades are reserved for those who have beaten their peers. In many subtle and some not so subtle ways, teachers demonstrate that what children learn means much less than that they triumph over their classmates. Is this not assault? Classroom defeat is only the pebble that creates widening ripples of hostility. It is self-perpetuating. It is reinforced by peer censure, parental disapproval, and loss of self-concept. If the classroom is a model, and if that classroom models competition, assault in the hallways should surprise no one.

Joseph Wax (adapted)

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

Alexandre Dumas

There's put-down humor, where a person or a group of people is the target of cruelty in the guise of a "joke." And then there's inclusive humor — the kind I practice and promote in my work. Inclusive humor means everyone is included in the laughter and it isn't at anyone else's expense.

Lynn Grasberg

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Robert Pollok

Back to Top