Parenthood wasn’t about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else’s. When you loved your kids, you’d give up everything...

it’s my responsibility to cultivate the man in my son. I can’t be passive about that.

If your child is constantly interrupting or doing other things to get your attention, he is not getting enough communication of the right kind. Just the fact that you are in the house with him...

There’s a Drunk Midget in My HouseAh, babies! They’re more than just adorable little creatures on whom you can blame your farts. Like most people who have had one baby, I am an expert on...

Scratch a female inmate, I’ve discovered, and you’ll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men.

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

But I got through the review, for all their Latin and French; I did, and if you doubt me, you just look at the end of the great ledger, turn it upside down, and you’ll...

Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice.I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and...

And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I’m betting some of those women would like to do great...

It’s certainly TOUGH being AWESOME all the time, but I do it so the kids have someone to look up to!

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-A sunny day with the leaves just turning,The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you playYour first game of fotball, then, like a satelliteWrenched from its orbit,...

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion;...

Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility...

Sum of life; Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, parenthood, old age and death.

You are almost never cool to your children.

I said that additionally, since I was planning to nurse, it be best if you were off the breast before I came back to work. My boss just looked at me dreamily and said, ‘That...

He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did...

It’s the silliness–the profligacy, and the silliness–that’s so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It’s as urgent an item on...

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur...

Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I’m saying is that not everybody should have children.

Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.

You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what...

That’s what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn’t stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because...

What is success, after all, but doing what you really want to do?

One of the ridiculously difficult things about raising children is that they are constantly developing and changing so that just when you think you have them figured out, they throw you a curve, a new...

Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? And could you in any way protect your son from Sansara? How could you?...

Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father’s...

In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent...

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

It’s tough being AWESOME all the time, but the kids need someone to look up to!

I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. (His 19-year-old daughter.) I cannot possibly do both.