Parent Yourself Quotes & Sayings

No matter what you do with your life during the day, there's always that moment when you have to wake up with yourself, with yourself and with the person that's sleeping beside you. That's the person that you make a home with, discuss life's big decisions with, share your finances, eat, shop, maybe parent with. That's the person you share your body with forever, kiss, touch, the one you sit on the couch with and watch movies, the one who gives you a hug when you've had a rough day. That's the person you put up a Christmas tree with and arrive home with for the holidays, the person you watch grow old and who still loves you when you're not as nice to look at, the one who holds your hand when you're dying. And none of that had anything to do with wrestling. — Eli Easton

Single parenthood is hard, but it's simple too. You just do everything yourself. — Amy Dickinson

A boy needs some territory to call his own. Does he get to choose what he wears - often? Does he have certain special toys that he does not have to let others play with? Is his room, especially, a little kingdom over which he has some say? Of course, a parent expects him to clean his room. I'm talking about choices of what color to paint it, what pictures he gets to hang on the walls. Do his parents and siblings have to knock before they enter? You might want to ask yourself, "The things that were precious to me when I was young - did I have any sort of control over them?" How else will he learn to rule? — John Eldredge

Have compassion for your humanity and your flaws. You're human and you're going to make mistakes. Look at yourself through the eyes of a loving parent ... — Lauren Mackler

Your parents will die before you do, so you'd better make your own life decisions. Your own choices are always good if you know yourself - especially in art, because whenever you do something new, everyone will be against you. — Yoshitaka Amano

There is one thing new in sexual mores and that is today's bisexual chic ... if you can't truthfully claim to be bisexual yourself, the next best thing is to reveal that one, or both, of your parents was. — Helen Lawrenson

If freedom, personal responsibility, self-initiative, honesty, integrity, and concern for others rank high in your system of values, and if they represent characteristics you would like to see in your children, then you will want to be a trustful parent. None of these can be taught by lecturing, coercion, or coaxing. They are acquired or lost through daily life experiences that reinforce or suppress them. You can help your children build these values by living them yourself and applying them in your relationship with your children. Trust promotes trustworthiness. Self-initiative and all of the traits that depend on self-initiative can develop only under conditions of freedom. — Peter Gray

One thing that happens when you have an alcoholic for a parent is you grow up the child of an alcoholic. ... For a quick trip around the bases, it means you blame yourself for everything, you avoid reality, you can't trust people, you're hungry to please. Which isn't all bad: perfectionism makes the straight-A student; lack of trust begets self-sufficiency; low self-esteem can be a terrific motivator; if everyone were so gung-ho on reality, there'd be no art. — Maria Semple

Think of each wound as you would of a child who has been hurt by a friend. As long as that child is ranting and raving, trying to get back at the friend, one wound leads to another. But when the child can experience the consoling embrace of a parent, she or he can live through the pain, return to the friend, forgive, and build up a new relationship. Be gentle with yourself, and let your heart be your loving parent as you live your wounds through. — Henri Nouwen

Pain is a spiritual wake-up call showing you that there are oceans you have not yet explored. Step beyond the world you know. Reach for heights that you never thought possible. Go to places you have deemed off limits. This is the time to take off the shell of your past and step into the rich possibilities of your future. God does not give us dreams that we cannot fulfill. If you want to do something great with your life-whether it's to fall madly in love, become a teacher, be a great parent-if you aspire to do something beyond what you are doing now, this is the time to begin. Trust yourself. — Debbie Ford

I'm not sure why I had to weather the stages of grief after hearing the news that night. Maybe it was the death of my singledom or the death of my own childhood that scared me. For some reason, when you're faced with the realization that you're going to become a parent, it immediately changes how you view yourself. You no longer think of yourself as someone else's child because you can't be a parent and a child. It's an official good-bye, and good-byes always scared the hell out of me. — Renee Carlino

I'm not saying parenting cured my narcissism, but it changed me and continues to change me every day. I am now a teeny tiny bit less of a narcissist. Being a parent is a selfless adventure. The worldview of "Take care of yourself first" is no longer logical to a sane person if your baby wakes up hungry in the middle of the night. You can't be like, "What's that? The baby is starving? Eh, forget her, I've got to get some sleep." For me, parenting was literally a wake-up call from my own simple selfishness. In other words, I'm not quite as horrible as I used to be. — Jim Gaffigan

It's a challenge getting rid of an accent by yourself. I have parents that have such thick accents. They are like, "She sounds fine." They didn't know. To them, I spoke perfect English because their accents were so heavy. I don't even want to know what I sounded like. I don't want to know! — Odeya Rush

Being a parent is a selfless adventure. The worldview of "Take care of yourself first" is no longer logical to a sane person if your baby wakes up hungry in the middle of the night. — Jim Gaffigan

The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally. You need to learn to stand up for yourself and what you believe and sometimes, pardon my language, kick some ass. — Queen Elizabeth II

No matter who you are, what you've accomplished, what your financial situation is - when you're dealing with a parent with Alzheimer's, you yourself feel helpless. The parent can't work, can't live alone, and is totally dependent, like a toddler. As the disease unfolds, you don't know what to expect. — Maria Shriver

If you live long enough as a parent, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bother to know about as well as the ones you do know about, all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don't think my father felt anything like this. — Alice Munro

We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth
from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you. — Jodi Picoult

At the highest level, there is the general Subject-Self metaphor, which conceptualizes a person as bifurcated. The exact nature of this bifurcation is specified more precisely one level down, where there are five specific instances of the metaphor. These five special cases of the basic Subject-Self metaphor are grounded in four types of everyday experience: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space, (3) entering into social relations, and (4) empathic projection-conceptually projecting yourself onto someone else, as when a child imitates a parent. The fifth special case comes from the Folk Theory of Essences: Each person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" Self. — George Lakoff

I grew up in a Christian home. The strictness comes with religion in general. Whether you grew up Jewish or Orthodox Jewish or Muslim, there are certain rules and regulations. But my parents instilled in me the importance of defining God for yourself. — Vera Farmiga

But here's the thing: once you become a parent ... once you start feeling a little funny and you buy a pregnancy test ... once you see a pink plus sign ... once you know it's not just you anymore ... well, you automatically carry around, for the rest of your life, an increased likelihood of having your heart broken. And it's a constant fear that we struggle to put to rest. We can choose to be afraid or we can choose to live. And I choose to live. Because an increased likelihood of having your heart broken also carries with it an increased likelihood of finding yourself the happiest you've ever been in life. — Kelle Hampton

With murder, the victim is gone, and not forced to deal with what happened to her. The family must deal with it, but not the victim. But rape is much worse. The victim has a lifetime of coping, trying to understand, of asking questions, and the worst part, of knowing the rapist is still alive and may someday escape or be released. Every hour of every day, the victim thinks of the rape and asks herself a thousand questions. She relives it, step by step, minute by minute, and it hurts just as bad.
Perhaps the most horrible crime of all is the violent rape of a child. A woman who is raped has a pretty good idea why it happened. Some animal was filled with hatred, anger and violence. But a child? A ten-year-old child? Suppose you're a parent. Imagine yourself trying to explain to your child why she was raped. Imagine yourself trying to explain why she cannot bear children. — John Grisham

When you say 'mother' or 'father' you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle- to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by- and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity. — Rebecca Solnit

Time mellows people as it mellows wine, as long as the grapes are good. You may set out to be a businesswoman or businessman but in the course of time end up caring for a dying parent, orphaned niece, or disabled brother. You may encounter illness yourself and end up being a writer, touching the heartstrings, not the purse strings of other people. That's why it's best to always be true to yourself and God and to be flexible within His will. He will use you. — Barbara Johnson

I ... understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't. — Jodi Picoult

Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else. — Joanne Harris

How much of our life is an act, anyway? You become a parent, you play a role. You act happy when you're depressed. You act like you are enthused by some things that hold no interest for you whatsoever. But sometimes, through this acting, this repeatedly telling yourself you really do like something, some form of appreciation sprouts. — Andersen Prunty

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst. — Khaled Hosseini

if your children see you mess up every now and then, they learn that you are only human and thus they will be more likely to practice compassion and patience for others. On top of that, when they see you pick yourself back up afterwards, they then learn how to be confident and determined in spite of the hardships facing them. Being real with our kids is one of the best things we can do; and although it will showcase our imperfections as a person and as a parent from time to time, it helps our kids to understand the facts of the real world. When all is said and done, this is what will turn our kids into well-rounded people. — Sean P.I. Stewart

When you have a lot of fake selves, most of the time it's because you haven't had parents around so you try to build characters to protect yourself. — Benjamin Clementine

If you've got great parents, once you grow up and have to live by yourself, you're going to create some fake self as you get comfortable wherever you are. — Benjamin Clementine

Whether or not you have children yourself, you are a parent to the next generation. If we can only stop thinking of children as individual property and think of them as the next generation, then we can realize we all have a role to play. — Charlotte Sophia Kasl

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on. — Bruno Bettelheim

while living on His script. While far from perfect, the Spiritually Healthy parent is a parent who walks each day, step by step, with God as his guide. Becoming a spiritually healthy family means you will allow God to call the shots for you and your family members and that you look to Him to give you wisdom instead of relying on your own strength and "great ideas". Because you realize you are a work in progress yourself, you offer your children grace when needed, while helping them see the corrected path that God desires all His children to follow. You recite the following things each — Michelle Anthony

One day ask your daughter the kind of mother she wants to be! One day ask your son the kind of father he wants to be! One day ask yourself the kind of parent you have been! And one day, ask yourself how you have run the race of life through the good and the bad times with the baton of life in your hands! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get to their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority-it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are-only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. — Ernest Becker

As you get older you will gain a bit more control over everything. Don't let anyone, even your parents, break you. Find good people who care about you and surround yourself with just them. If you can't find them at first, find good music and fall into it, let it hold you until they come. I truly hope you enjoy the new record. — Davey Havok

What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us. — James Hollis

Obviously no parent does everything right. It's this weird thing that happens where you are striving to be as good as you can be so that they turn out well. And that requires that you be a really great, evolved, aware person in every moment. Which is pretty awesome. But it's also putting tremendous pressure on yourself
which is why women feel so guilty! — Jennifer Lopez

A good character is something you must make for yourself. It cannot be inherited from parents. It cannot be created by having extraordinary advantages. It isn't a gift of birth, wealth, talent or station. It is the result of your own endeavor. It is the reward that comes from living good principles and manifesting a virtuous and honorable life. — L. Tom Perry

Don't go to summer camp. Bury your parents in the backyard and have the place to yourself. — Henry Rollins

The only person with you all your life is you. Your parents die. Things inside you die - illusions, gushes of personality. Only you can sort yourself out. Yourself may not be all you need, but it's all you've got. — Kate Bush

When your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.
But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.
Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.
And after that, you have nothing to fear again. — Hanya Yanagihara

There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents. — Frank Pittman

Anyone who loses a parent, you have to find those parts of yourself that your parent held true in themselves, especially if they're supportive parents. — Anthony Rapp

Forgiveness multiplies and melts rigid postures. Try again and again with self forgiveness. Be the kind parent to yourself you may not have had. — SARK

The love a parent had for a child, there is nothing else like it. No other love so consuming. No father-not even Valentine-would sacrifice his son for a hunk of metal, no matter how powerful." (The Inquisitor)
"You don't know my father. He'll laugh in your face and offer you some money to mail my body back to Idris." (Jace)
"Don't be absurd-"
"You're right," Jace said. "Come to think of it, he'll probably make you pay the shipping charges yourself. — Cassandra Clare

Seeing your child for the first time is rarest of occasions. You see glimpses of yourself from the past. The potential of a brand new life happening right before your eyes. And most importantly, that life begins again. — J.R. Rim

You will find love, when you surrender yourself to love. — Lailah Gifty Akita

As a parent, if give yourself what you need, your children will watch you doing that and will give themselves what they need. — Susan Cain

It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living ... To live is to find out for yourself what is true ... — Jiddu Krishnamurti

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim. — Jodi Picoult

When you have a despicable person as a parent, I truly believe you can't escape hating any part of yourself that resembles him or her. Whether it's a physical similarity, a talent, a propensity or an inclination that you share, all commonalities are abhorrent to you.
I look like my father. I have his thick dark hair and bright blue eyes. I have my mother's nose, but I have my father's wide, full mouth and his height. I am his child, and I hate the man. I hate that I look like him. — Penny Reid

Respect gods before demigods, heroes before men, and first among men your parents; but respect yourself most of all. — Pythagoras

Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. — Thomas Paine

Living a life of faith is not superficial. You are not simply living in some hurt from the past, trying to be the top dog, or even tying to fulfill a parent inadequacy. No, you are on a unique journey, living each day anew, with freedom to be yourself, with special guidance from above, there is a set purpose to what your doing, and some goal in mind. — Phil Mitchell

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, or skills, or whether instead you are directly or subtly pushing her to hide them. — Alexandra Robbins

At a certain age your parents seem like the most embarrassing thing on the whole entire planet, and you want to be nowhere near them. But at the end of the day, you know that you can't literally do anything without them. You love your parents through and through, and they love you probably even more than you could ever imagine until you're a parent yourself. — Vanessa Hudgens

Conduct yourself towards your parents as you would have your children conduct themselves towards you. — Isocrates

The playing field is anything but level when you walk into the grocery store. So much government subsidy goes into processed foods. Even when you're well-meaning as a parent or a shopper for yourself, you can't help but be pulled toward the highly processed food. — Michael Moss

Running is a kind of truth serum. It brutally strips away everything you put on and leaves you with only yourself. — Marc Parent

Taking responsibility for yourself and your happiness gives a great freedom to children who have felt guilty and responsible for your unhappiness (which they always do). A child can never hope to balance the scales or repay the debt when a parent has sacrificed her life, her happiness, her fulfilment for the child or the family. Seeing a parent fully embrace life gives a child the permission to do the same, just as seeing a parent suffer indicates to the child that suffering is what life is all about. — Robin Norwood

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork? — Tom Hodgkinson

Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. — Thomas Jefferson

If you're an educator, caregiver, or parent, and you find yourself unable to contain your anger with kids, please consider getting professional help. Excessive harshness, whether it's emotional or physical in nature, can cause lasting harm to children. — Laura L. Smith

To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you'll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It's to produce a creator. — Irvin D. Yalom

I'm a firm believer and always have been that there aren't all that many things that you should not express to children in an age-appropriate manner, and as a parent, that is your job - to be discerning as to whether or not your child can handle the information, provided you have the ability to express yourself in that age-appropriate way. — LeVar Burton

Perhaps being a parent has changed career more in that you ask yourself how long you'll be away from home. My eldest child is approaching school age so that becomes more important. They're less portable. — Cate Blanchett

Heroes aren't perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they're perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into. — Christopher McDougall

If you are a parent, you will need enough courage not to interfere. Open doors of unknown directions to the child, so he can explore. He does not know what he has in him, nobody knows. He has to grope in the dark. Don't make him afraid of darkness, don't make him afraid of failure, don't make him afraid of the unknown. Give him support. When he is going on an unknown journey, send him on with all your support, with all your love, with all your blessings. Don't let him be affected by your fears. You may have fears, but keep them to yourself. Don't unload those fears on the child because that will be interfering. — Osho

Everything just feels so empty without her. She was more a parent to me than my birth parents were. She took me in, fed, dressed me, but most importantly, she treated me with respect. She taught me that my abilities were nothing to be ashamed of, nothing I should try so hard to deny. She convinced me that what I had was a gift-not a curse- and that I shouldn't let other people's narrow minds and fears determine how I love, what I do, or how I perceive myself in the world. She actually made me believe that in no way, shape, or form did their uninformed opinions make me a freak. — Alyson Noel

You don't need to worry about defining the roles in a way that you will live with for the rest of your life - just consider the week and write down the areas you see yourself spending time in during the next seven days. Here are two examples of the way people might see their various roles. 1. Individual 1. Personal Development 2. Spouse/Parent 2. Spouse 3. Manager New Products 3. Parent 4. Manager Research 4. Real Estate Salesperson 5. Manager Staff Dev. 5. Community Service 6. Manager Administration 6. Symphony Board Member 7. Chairman United Way SELECTING GOALS. The next step is to think of one or two important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days. These would be recorded as goals. — Stephen R. Covey

I challenge youth to cooperate with parents who are concerned about your reading and your viewing. Be concerned yourself about what you take into your mind. Young people, you would never eat a meal of spoiled or contaminated food if you could help it, would you? Select your reading and viewing carefully and in good taste. — Marvin J. Ashton

Even if you find yourself in a heated exchange with your toddler, it is better for your child to feel the heat rather than for himto feel you withdraw emotionally ... Active and emotional involvement between parent and child helps the child make the limits a part of himself. — Stanley Greenspan

Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn't matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800 meter race. Becoming a mature adult means, among other things, that you define yourself relative to your own potential, not relative somebody else's standard. — Leonard Sax

When your parents split up, it's impossible to delude yourself about fairytale romance and happy endings. — Jennifer Aniston

Don't see yourself as a product of your parents DNA, but rather as a brand new idea from heaven. — Max Lucado

The beginning of sanctity is loving yourself as a creation of God. And that means all of yourself, even the parts that you wish weren't there, the parts that you wish God hadn't made, the parts that you lament. God loves us like a parent loves a child - often more for the parts of the child that are weaker or where the child struggles or falters. More often than not, those very weaknesses are the most important paths to holiness, because they remind you of your reliance on God. — James Martin

Parents try the best they can. They want the best for you. But a lot of their stuff is just their own. If you can pull yourself away from it and not always feel like they're attacking you, then it's easier to deal with. — Jessica Alba

You are not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your real purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. Only in God do we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance and our destiny. — Rick Warren

If an album or a video game exerts more influence on your child's mind, then you must ask yourself: what kind of a parent are you? — Lourd Ernest H. De Veyra

To be a good parent, you need to take care of yourself so that you can have the physical and emotional energy to take care of your family. — Michelle Obama

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success. — Fran Lebowitz

Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well ... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child. — Lisa Coyne

Why is nostalgia such a bad thing? Nostalgia is a longing to return. If you really loved where you came from, if, in essence, you really loved yourself, how can you not want that to exist? It's like wanting your parents keep living. — Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The first person you have to inspire every day is yourself. Running will do that. — Marc Parent

No one owns you - no matter what the relationship. You are not here on this earth to fulfill the dreams, wants or wishes of a parent, a mate or a child. You are also not responsible to protect any other person from facing their own consequences or realities. You are here to exist, to develop and to grow and be responsible to and for yourself. In the bigger picture of things, it would be well if you also contributed to making this world a better place to be because you passed through it. — Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse

So many people have said to me that when you become a school parent, it is like going back to school yourself. Some of those insecurities come out and are projected through your child. — Liane Moriarty

If the whole world seems like it's against you, it helps to know that you've still got home. A safe place. It just takes one person - a teacher, a friend, a parent. If I didn't have you and Dad, if you hadn't made it so clear you loved me as much as you did, or if you'd said, 'yeah, why don't you do it, and put yourself out of our misery, just shut up,' I would have killed myself. I really would have. I spent most of those days wishing I were dead anyway, and what always stopped me was the fact that doing so would destroy the lives of the only people who ever cared about me. — Nenia Campbell