Forget Batman: when I really thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be my dad.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel...

Disappointment is part of parenthood, Jasper. The trick is learnin’ to love your kids even when they disappoint you.

I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were...

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it’s no one’s fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage...

Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn’t matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800...

Helplessness in the face of a child’s suffering is the curse of parenthood.

Mothers observe all, absorb all, give all, forgive all, offer all, suffer all, feel all, heal all, hope for all, pray for all.But most of all,Mothers love always.

There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.

Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work...

That night I experienced one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents, when you notice a difference in your child that’s been coming over a long time, and you’re faced with...

Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.

Oh, dio mio, se fossi un angelo del Signore segnerei con una croce le porte di casa dei miei figli, in modo da tener lontano le sventure e la malattia. Purtroppo, per quell’alto incarico mi...

Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow...

Nothing’s scarier than having a sick child, and one so newly born, and so vulnerable. It’s the worst thing for a parent.

I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I’d consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It...

We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a...

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you’re not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that’s my time, 1 or...

If you do not have a close friendship with your children, I will.” Child Molester warning all parents from the book Type 1 Sociopath

We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did—a reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you...

A boy, if he’s lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys...

There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That...

Culture was actually humanity’s attempt to extend the womb.

Every parent is an artist, but not every artist is apparent.

Was she insane?! She would lose her head before she was 20!

On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents’ eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.

People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, “The baby is crying, you should feed her,” and the maternal grandmother will say, “Why is that baby crying so much, making...

I was into third guesses with Theo and Maddy. Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I opted to buythe van and drive cross-country instead of dumping us all in a plane. It gave us some...

We can’t surrender to the culture. We’ve minimized the role of fathers, so we’ve created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s,...

Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.

What was I waiting for with regards to the sea-soaked woman laughing in front of me? What would I tell myself if I didn’t watch her grow gorgeously ripe with our baby? If we didn’t...

I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think?

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a...

Shouldn’t we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the “most” of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging...

Her mother admonished through closed lips, the sound a mother can make mean anything from “pick up your socks” to “we are very disappointed you have murdered those orphans.

Mangarap ka at abutin mo ito. Wag mo sisihin ang sira mong pamilya, palpak mong syota, pilay mong tuta, o mga lumilipad na ipis…Kung may pagkukulang sayo ang mga magulang mo, pwede kang manisi at...

I don’t think it matters how many parents you’ve got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

Emma, Emma, Emma,” I said, wishing I could somehow teach her to take the smaller blows of life in her stride.

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.

He never had nothing of his own before, except the kid, and he can’t claim but half the credit, there, maybe less. T.J.’s blond like his mamma, and stubborn, too. Won’t let nobody hold him...

You´re my son, Ed. You might be idiotic and irresponsible, but it doesn´t make the slightest difference to what I feel for you. I´m pissed off that you could have thought it would

Worry not that your child listens to you; worry most that they watch you.

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

It takes a society to raise a generation.

Our children are only as brilliant as we allow them to be.

Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James – oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like...

Confession: Having kids did not fix me. I was not somehow more whole, less botched-up, or more certain just because I had a kid… I was still me, with all my holes and problems and...

Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.