Expect to change yourself in order to change your life experience.

No child ever became ‘good’ by being told that she or he was bad or by beating her/him.

So, your best defense is knowledge. It really is power, as they say…The more you know, the more easily you will develop your own philosophies about child rearing. When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but...

Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.

That’s the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Quality time is not the same as the everydayness of being together. Let’s neither glorify nor undervalue.

Your kids never really leave do they? They might live elsewhere, sometimes not even on the same continent, but Mum is always first port of call when there’s trouble. Parenting is a lifetime commitment.

There is entirely too much tut-tutting in this realm, if you ask me. All these kings would do a deal better if they put down their swords and listened to their mothers.

It’s never too early to begin pointing your little ones’ souls heavenward.

By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age.

If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have...

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while.

His son’s transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

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 what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is. Risk was not an event we had survived, but the place where...

I used to wonder why I had hair on my legs, but now I know it’s for my toddler sons and daughters to pull themselves up off the ground with as I scream in pain.

Generally, crises were Mom’s domain. Dad’s job was to listen, nod, act curmudgeonly, and offer to pay for things.

I realize parenting is hard and boring at times and a four-hour break would be super, but this is the job we signed up for. Some days it sucks, but most days it’s great.

One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can’t tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young...

This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don’t ask, don’t tell, stay civil.

I tell Esther she should ease up on lard. There’s no need to mix lard in with Scottie’s rice, chicken, and beans. I tell her she hasn’t read the blogs. I’ve read the blogs. I know what Scottie should eat.

As parents we have a tendency to overprotect; it’s okay to try and show them all positives but we cannot forget that the real world has teeth

Daddy, are you going to yell at us some more today?’Neary gazed down into her clear, guileless eyes. That was how he looked to her—a yelling machine. And she was prepared to accept more yelling because she loved him.

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.

Maggie had learned a long time ago that each day with a child was filled with two kinds of battles: those that won the war, and those that did not.

By exchanging quality time for ‘turn-up’ times, what many of today’s wayward youngsters have become – men and women of the village have failed them.

Mothers are the ultimate executives. Instead of raising profits they are raising humanity.

More of anything only makes us more of what we already are. If we are happy, it can bring more happiness. If we are depressed, it will make us more depressed.

I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ’s love.”…make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believe it is God’s will for me to serve my family through them.

Imagine what it must be like for teenagers who don’t feel they have room to breathe in their own homes. If you are a parent reading this book, you care about your child. If she is quirky, unusual, or nonconformist, ask yourself whether you are doing everything you can to nurture her unusual interests, style,...

The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, “What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that...

The more love and support your child receives, the richer his or her life becomes, and nurses can certainly add to the circle of love surrounding your child.

When do you become a man? When you become your own man. When other men trust you to do a man’s work. Trust you with their name, their reputation, their thoughts. Trust you to watch their backs and trust you with their lives.

One of the greatest things parents can do for their children is to believe in them(their uniqueness) and help them realize their own God-given dreams

Identify your Radar – it’s your brain functioning optimally; not a vague intuition or cosmic sixth sense.Train your Radar in key areas like: evaluating people, personal safety, healthy relationships, physical and mental well-being, money and credit cards, career choice, how to get organized.Meet the Radar Jammers. They have the power to turn down or turn...

Time grants a unique perspective which allows us to see events through a filter of accumulated wisdom.

We can only afford two children’ really means, ‘We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals’, for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family’s whole income, just as housework...

The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is...

Mantras are the past & the future.

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

Sometimes our work as caregivers is not for the faint of heart. But, you will never know what you are made of until you step into the fire. Step bravely!

Her conclusion: “You just have to follow your own heart” when it comes to medical decision-making.

Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life – that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower’s parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren’t alive, their...

The irreducible, ultimate element in religious faith is the insistence that we are created things; male and female He created them; without God we are nothing. And yet, when men and women have children and become parents, they unmistakably become creators, incompetent, accidental and partial creators, no doubt, but creators none the less. It is...

Children of God, Children of the light.

It’s a fathers job to spoil his daughters shamelessly, it’s their husbands job to tame them. Prince Zehava-The Dragon Prince

And they certainly wouldn’t take you along to a murder. That would be irresponsible parenting.

There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.

Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.

Since we have had this baby with us, I have never again wondering why I never got pregnant. There is no doubt in my mind that God, in His wonderful way, was saving us to be the parents of this wonderful little boy.