Child Rearing Quotes

“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”
― Peggy O'Mara

“If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”
― P.D. James

“Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time, but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize our experience. An infant or young child who is abused, violated or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about.”
― Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption

“The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.”
― Jane Smiley

“When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendship, art. I would not have invented child-rearing.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“There are a hundred ways in which a boy can injure—if not indeed kill—himself. The more adventurous he is and the greater his initiative, the more ways he will find. If you protect him from each of the first hundred, he is sure to find the hundred and first. Though most men can look back on their boyhood and tremble at the narrowness of some of their escapes, most boys do in fact survive more or less intact, and the wise father is the trusting father.”
― Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places

“What, you people expect women to tear apart their bodies and then go to all the bother of raising the children? That takes years, you know,” Serene remarked sternly. “The women’s labour is brief and agonizing, and the man’s is long and arduous. This seems only just. What on earth are men contributing to their children’s lives in the human world? Why would any human woman agree to have a child?” “The more she talks the more sense it all makes,” said Elliot. “Has anyone else discovered that?”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands

“By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go….Miss Leefolt, she’d narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Mothers are not simply models of femininity to their daughters but also examples of how a woman reacts to a man. Daughters learn about fathers, and men, not only by being with Dad but also by observing their parent's marital relationship-- or its unraveling.

When mothers and fathers are supportive or each other, it makes each of their paternal jobs infinitely easier. And parents who cannot bear being in one another's presence reveal as much, if not more, to a child about romantic love as anything the mother or father might say.”
― Victoria Secunda, Women And Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man In Your Life

“In the following pages I shall apply the term "poisonous pedagogy" to this very complex endeavor. It will be clear from the context in question which of its many facets I am emphasizing at the moment. The specific facets can be derived directly from the preceding quotations from child-rearing manuals. These passages teach us that:

1. Adults are the masters (not the servants!) of the dependent child.

2. They determine in godlike fashion what is right and what is wrong.

3. The child is held responsible for their anger.

4. The parents must always be shielded.

5. The child's life affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult.

6. The child's will must be "broken" as soon as possible.

7. All this must happen at a very early age, so the child "won't notice" and will
therefore not be able to expose the adults.

The methods that can be used to suppress vital spontaneity in the child are: laying traps, lying, duplicity, subterfuge, manipulation, "scare" tactics, withdrawal of love, isolation, distrust, humiliating and disgracing the child, scorn, ridicule, and coercion even to the point of torture.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“Whether you’ve ever considered it or not, you’re an author. And the stories that you write are penned across the hearts of your children. Therefore, be careful with the pen because you’re writing on some very precious paper.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Parents are not bestowed with angels to cherish, but unripe fools to correct" (Proverbs 22: 15)”
― Royal Raj S

“That was another nice thing about my parents. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“Last Christmas Daphne hadn't been born yet; nor had Fanny. Now here sat Daphne chewing a wad of blue tissue while Franny stirred her fists through Agatha's jigsaw puzzle. They both seemed so accustomed to being here. And Danny and Lucy had completely vanished . Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.”
― Anne Tyler, Saint Maybe

“Some may argue that we shouldn't shelter our children. We should let them see and experience the sins that are all around us. By keeping the children unaware, they say, we are preventing the development of their defenses. I disagreed. We have our whole lives to experience the ugliness, our whole lives to grapple with society's misplaced priorities. Trying to give a child a childhood was nothing to be ashamed of.”
― J.D. Trafford, Little Boy Lost

“Do we let our children be the way they want to be?
Do we let them feel what they want to feel?
We don't.
We constantly try to change them.
There is a difference between changing and moulding.”
― Raisha Lalwani, The Diary on the Fifth Floor

“What a funny and charming accent! Did you say it was New York you came from, Miss Hunter - the Bowery?"
Gay lay down and yawned, and pulled the blanketing swaths of grass over herself. "Pity you weren't properly smacked in your younger days, Lady Jane. Good night.”
― James Leslie Mitchell, Gay Hunter

“Being a Dad is not about creating a life, for that demands little of your life. It’s about cultivating a life, for that demands all of your life.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The political strategy of victimizing prostitutes also serves this purpose of branding male desire and confining it in its own squalor. He can pay to come if he wants, but he'll have to rub shoulders with filth, shame, and poverty. The prostitution transaction -- "I pay you, you satisfy me" -- is the basis of the heterosexual contract. It is hypocritical to pretend, as we do, that this transaction is foreign to our culture.”
― Virginie Despentes

“You do not realise your child is fast growing only when they have grown taller than you. It’s when you longer have to hold them in their hands to cross a busy road.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Our obligation as parents is not to make our children happy but to teach them how to be happy; it's not to make them comfortable but to teach them how to tolerate discomfort. For these lessons—upsetting to them as they may be now—will better equip them for survival later when it matters most.”
― Taiki Matsuura

“You are the jewel
in the crown of motherhood.”
― Sandra Sealy, Chronicles Of A Seawoman: A Collection Of Poems

“Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.”
― Saki, The Jesting of Arlington Stringham

“Sense such humiliation, combined with prohibiting a child's verbal expression, is a constant and universally encountered factor in child-rearing, the influence of this factor in the child's later development is easily overlooked.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“One takes great pleasure in seeing children acquire skills one does not have, seeing them become, thankfully, different from oneself.”
― Tim Parks, An Italian Education

“Any system of training which does not make a
knowledge of Scripture the first thing is unsafe and unsound.”
― J.C. Ryle

“She wanted to tell me that Danielle is having another baby."
"Another one?"
I loved that Bee's response was similar to mine. Perhaps it was just that we were childless, but I think we both agreed that anyone who willingly has more than two children is clinically insane.”
― Sarah Jio, The Violets of March

“In my day, living where I did, I was taught to say 'yes, sir' and 'yes ma'am.' I was taught respect.
On the one hand, adults in Greensville also showed respect for kids. You rarely heard a grown-up curse in front of a child, for example. Kids were taught to mind their manners all right, but as far as I could tell, the older folk set a decent example.”
― Ray Charles, Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story