They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.

What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years,...

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

Distrust won’t do good to you.But still if you ever do.Doubt you husband,Maybe doubt your wife.But never suspect,your kid’s father,or the mother of your child.

You raise them half-decent, and they grow up and leave. They move to Miami or California– someplace with gourmet groceries and nude beaches because you’ve reared them to cook good and be liberal minded. It’s...

If coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let’s in celebration; / We have contained the population.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

We made mistakes trying to correct mistakes. Isn’t that how we knew we were parents?

The mother was conflicted between what she knows that what’s possible.

The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don’t hold nothing back.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

Mothering you is the first thing of consequence I have ever done.

If the world is so cruel you are frightened of it, I will hold you, and protect you, and teach it to love you as I already love you.

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At...

It’s not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience – that’s why most people have kids, isn’t it?

It wasn’t until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison...

Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment (‘Daddy,’ wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, ‘people will ask “why is old Christopher Hitchens...

… the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.

Kids don’t always stop to judge or analyze a new experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one.

Anyone can dig a ditch. There’s no way to dig smarter. Or dig faster. Having a baby is like being assigned to dig a ditch. That goes all the way to the horizon.

Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more...

Parents in the early half of the twentieth century were primarily concerned with the development of character in their children. They wanted to be certain that their children were ready to cope with adversity, for...

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.

My handsome husband and I didn’t make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Ayelet Waldman – who famously wrote of her ‘smug...

abuse card”, the custodial parent has the aforementioned ability to operate as a double agent: on the one-side, the protector and caretaker; while on the other side, the divider and abuser. Similarly, the state can...

That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon...

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like...

He felt her heartbeat against his shoulder, through his jacket, light as raindrops.

Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies....

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.

Raising teenage sons and daughters is a long and tiresome journey. With God’s help the final outcome will be worthwhile.

As parents we’re meant to help each other out and build each other up.

As I grew into womanhood my confusion at the world became more apparent. I was taking comfort in behaviours that were familiar, not bathing, wearing multiple layers of clothes and, like my mother, I was...

But the smell of the hospital, the sting of those overhead lights in the night, the snippets of conversations I had overheard, stayed with me and marked the beginning of how I came to know...

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.

The greatest lessons I learned from my father didn’t come from lectures or discipline or even time spent together. What has stuck with me is his example. From watching, I chose whether to be or...

Oh, brothers and sisters, families can be forever! Do not let the lures [or the irritants] of the moment draw you away from them! Divinity, eternity, and family–they go together, hand in hand, and so...

In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the...

I have that hypocrisy of a parent in that I’m like,’Come on, you’ve got to toughen up at the same time let me take care of that for you.

I kept glancing at her animated face, scrunched up as though imitating an adult. I got hit with that overwhelming feeling. It sneaked up on me. Parents get it from time to time. You are...

Children act on the words they hear.May your words be gracious to the hearing of children.May your words inspire and challenge children to fulfill their true potential.

A man with no children can easily be lulled into a sense that time is standing still. It’s not. It’s marching past us, relentlessly. Having a child growing and changing before your eyes makes this...

But the truth is, there’s little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood....

we will seek out the imagery of vice.

We both liked children; we just didn’t want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they...

We watched each other evolve into parents, with all the fear, rage and confusion evolution can involve. Our eight-year-old is the incarnation of our union; we are forever fused by her blood. My old take...

grand experiment”, and other influences of parenthood and childrearing.

Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man’s son?’His father did look up at that. ‘I didn’t raise another man’s son,’ he said sharply. ‘I raised my own.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do...