“Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don’t want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it’s also a parent’s worst nightmare: That they won’t need you. It’s like the real tragedy of parenting.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer
“Attachment parenting is not a passive parenting style.”
– Mayim Bialik
“I barely have time for my own children. To adopt more children and not have time for them, that would be poor parenting on my part.”
– Mary J. Blige
“Very often when you see families it’s all perfect and neat, and parenting isn’t like that. You do have constant negotiations. Things are ever developing and ever changing, and you constantly have to evaluate how you deal with your kids.”
– Clive Owen
“Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child’s tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It’s not funny and it’s not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn’t the least bit funny.”
– Ben Stein
“We’re living in a time when parenting is not at all mirroring the way I was parented. For me, I just followed my parents around on their errands when they were busy on the phone, I was quiet. It’s a different kettle of fish these days: They run the house, and you listen to their music, and you go to their appointments.”
– Edie Falco
“What lingers from the parent’s individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.”
– Virginia Satir
“Don’t reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a ‘moral hazard,’ because the bailout absolved the bank’s bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again.”
– Eliot Spitzer
“Autism is a neurological disorder. It’s not caused by bad parenting. It’s caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain’s computer cables that hook up the different brain departments.”
– Temple Grandin
“Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?”
– Erica Jong
“Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth.”
– Jennifer Aniston
“While not impossible, it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.”
– Jane Fonda
“I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting.”
– Barbara Bush
“No, I’ve never wanted kids. But I do read about parenting a lot.”
– Fiona Apple
“I’m trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived.”
– Eddie Vedder
“Of course, the ideal scenario for parenting is obviously two parents of a mature age.”
– Jennifer Aniston
“My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book ‘Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers’ – this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford’s wire hangers look like pool noodles.”
– Sloane Crosley
“The Golden Rule of Parenting is do unto your children as you wish your parents had done unto you!”
– Louise Hart
“I hope to find the roles that are age appropriate but not yearning to be younger, or parenting ad nauseam.”
– Debra Winger
“My mom’s a Catholic, and my dad’s a Jew, and they didn’t want anything to do with anything.”
– Isabelle Huppert
“I’d just as soon stay home and raise babies.”
– June Allyson
“I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house they want places to play.”
– Beverly Cleary
“I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin.”
– Norma Shearer
“There are 80 million moms in the United States. Forty million stay at home with their children.”
– Andrew Shue
“There are some great questions to ask your doctor. If he says ‘no,’ then you find yourself a different doctor. There really has to be a change in how we medically look at women at this time. I mean, this is not just baby gloom.”
– Marie Osmond
“I regret not having had more time with my kids when they were growing up.”
– Tina Turner
“I wasn’t very good about juggling family and my career. I was interested in who was coming to the children’s birthday party, what my son was writing. I was thinking about Legos.”
– Jill Clayburgh
“It’s a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.”
– Anne Sullivan
“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.”
– Marjorie Holmes
“We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.”
– John Sculley