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.

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.