Quotes & Sayings About Parenting Adults

As children we are taught, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me!" As adults we teach those same words to our own children while simultaneously we sue one another for defamation or verbal assault. Ah, the naked leading the blind. — Bryan Oftedahl

So often, children are punished for being human. Children are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes, yet we adults have them all the time! We think if we don't nip it in the bud, it will escalate and we will lose control. Let go of that unfounded fear and give your child permission to be human. We all have days like that. None of us are perfect, and we must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves. All of the punishments you could throw at them will not stamp out their humanity, for to err is human, and we all do it sometimes. — Rebecca Eanes

Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

How can families harm us when they love us? Very easily, unfortunately. Most of us overlook one important fact when we think love is enough: Love and respect aren't the same thing.
Love is fusion. As a baby, you belong to your parents, you're extension of them.
Respect is differentiation: you belong to yourself, and you're an extension of no one.
Differentiation is essential for happiness of adults. — Barbara Sher

By teaching our children to stay in line we create well-behaved followers. While this may make parenting a bit easier, it has enormous costs later in life. These same children grow up to be unhappy adults who desperately want to lead their own lives, yet lack the necessary skills to do so. — Cheryl Richardson

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women - sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two. — Monique Morris

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents
or a whole lot of us, at least
lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father
or even better, both of them in tandem
then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence. — Robert McCammon

A child has a deep longing to discover that the World is based on Truth. Respect that longing. In our attempt to help children grow into Inspired Adults, we wish them to carry the Youthfulness of their Souls, and the Wonders of Childhood into their old age.'
Conscious Parenting by Natasa Pantovic Nuit Quotes about kids and world based on truth — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

Today, for most kids in the United States and Canada, kids' primary attachment is to other kids. "For the first time in history," Neufeld observes, "young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role - their own peers. . — Leonard Sax

Even after a peak parenting experience, children never transition to a fully self-tuning physiology. Adults remain social animals: they continue to require a source of stabilization outside themselves. That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own - not should or shouldn't be, but can't be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. (86) — Thomas Lewis

As the adults, we are the ones who set the stage for vitality, love, or disharmony in the home. We set ourselves up for one or the other, and our children take their cues from us. — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

Since all life's stories begin at home, the characters and plot are written over a lifetime. Children are products of their parents and their early environments. They become adults who often life out early roles, scripts, relationship patterns, unmet needs, and expectations. Early relationships plant seeds for later ones. Therefore, it is natural (at appropriate times) for both parent and child to examine their roles as family members so they can learn, grow, heal, and thrive over time. Parenting for Life holds parents accountable, helps children forge their own paths, and strengthens the parent-child bond through love, respect, and empathy. — Nina Sidell

It matters to ourselves, of course, but it matters terribly to other people. Moral failure or spiritual failure or whatever you call it, makes such a vicious circle ... It seems as if when we love people and they fall short, we retaliate by falling shorter ourselves. Children are like that. Adults have a fearful responsibility. When they fail to live up to what children expect of them, the children give up themselves. So each generation keeps failing the next. — Dorothy Whipple

This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone's responsibility; all adults were "aunties" and "uncles". — Aminta Arrington

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage. — Thomas Szasz

It is such a privilege to learn from children as they discover new worlds of possibility and give themselves fully over to their dreams, inspiring a few adults along the way. — Colleen Mariotti

Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were. — Haruki Murakami

I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults. — Brene Brown

humans who have lived through the singular experience of parenting without being irrevocably changed by the process. We all wonder, as our children grow into adults, what we have done, or not done, that has contributed to, or detracted from, the happiness of these special beings we have brought into existence. The — Arthur C. Clarke

Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child? — Scott Simon

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. — Thomas Szasz

[I]f we can bring our children understanding, comfort, and hopefulness when they need this kind of support, then they are more likely to grow into adults who can find these resources within themselves later on. (from the introduction) — Fred Rogers

Parenting is a gift for adults' spiritual growth spurts, and it's a challenge to think of anything else that fills a home with more laughter! — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. — Peter De Vries

Some addicts do not even have basic parenting and instead are beaten, sexually abused, left to be looked after by a dysfunctional 'carer', put in orphan homes or rejected by their community. If you calculate the millions of emotionally neglected children and observe them growing up together trying to 'get by in life', you will understand why many adults (adult children) have addictive personalities. — Christopher Dines

Stories arrest us. Parents use stories to capture the attention of active children. Preachers use stories to capture the attention of sleepy adults. — Tony Reinke

That assumption - that labeling and sorting children based on gender doesn't really matter as long as everyone is treated fairly - would hold true if children only paid attention to the more overt, obvious messages we adults send. If children only listened to our purposeful messages, parenting would be easy. Most (but not all) parents and teachers take great effort in treating their children fairly, regardless of gender. Parents don't need to say to their daughters, "You probably won't enjoy math" or say to their sons, "Real boys don't play with dolls." Most parents wouldn't dream of saying these blatant stereotypes to their kids. But research has shown that when we label (and sort and color-code) by gender, children do notice. And it matters - children are learning whether you mean to be teaching them or not. — Christia Spears Brown

It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy. — Adam Phillips

And since we're all adults here, let's be brutally honest-most babies are not actually attractive. In fact, they're weird and freakish looking. A large percentage of them are squinty-eyed and bald and their faces are all mushed toegther, kind of like Renee Zellweger pushed up against a glass window. — Joan Rivers

Parents ought to feel more comfortable about the care of their children than some experts would seem to permit. If children were so fragile and parenting so difficult to learn, where would we all be as adults? — Sandra Scarr

They say it is hard to raise children. They say I would understand it
when I have children of my own. They say I would understand it when I go through the experience myself.

It is not easy to raise children into adults. There are so many things that could go wrong. — Marcella Purnama

Non-alcoholic ways in which parents may not 'be there' for the children can include:
- violence and sexual abuse
- workholism
- gambling
- transquilliser addiction-
- womanizing
- frequent journeys abroad
- death
- suicide
- being unemployed or unemployable
- frequent hospitalisation
- mental or physical handicap
- excessive religiosity
- rigid rules and regulations
- homes where children are never allowed to be themselves but must always be pleasing to adults — David Stafford

We're told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy.
Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits - more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit - but also as being so miserable that they're in therapy. Or there's an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist. — Alfie Kohn

Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. They were not sent away from home each day to a place just for children but lived, learned, worked, and played in the real world, alongside adults and other children of all ages. — Rachel Gathercole

In such a band, a woman could have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and women) simultaneously, and all of the band's adults cooperated in parenting its children. — Yuval Noah Harari

I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that. — Kelly Corrigan

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. — T.F. Hodge

Your children should not have to act appropriately so that you can feel like a valuable person. It is not their job to validate you or erase past relationship indictments against you with their performance. In a healthy Christian family children are not there for the adults, adults are there to be resources for their children. — Jeff VanVonderen

It is one of the paradoxes of parenting, and often a painful paradox, that even as our children need us for love and trust, they also need us for honest differing. It's not only over limits and rules ... [but also] about what we represent in the way of culture, traditions, and values. We owe it to our children to let them know what we believe, and if they differ with us, we owe it to them to be honest adversaries, for it is through this honest confrontation that children can grow into adults who have a firm sense of their place in the sequence of the generations. — Fred Rogers

The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies. — Germaine Greer

Adults need to teach the children they love about sexual abuse so they know what to do if they encounter it. We need to prepare them so they know who to tell, should a violation occur, so they don't have to live with a painful secret, long into adulthood. — Carolyn Byers Ruch

On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time. — Rachel Gathercole

Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil. — Walt Disney Company

Research shows that what works and is healthy for adults also works well for children, if adjusted to be age-appropriate. Children, like adults, do not suffer from a deficiency of white sugar, white flour, junk food, or processed foods. A growing child as well as an adult is hurt by junk foods and benefited by healthy foods. — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed. — Rebecca Goldstein