Responsibility As Parents Quotes & Sayings

I knew a teacher that kept a calendar on his desk. He didn't use it for lesson planning though. Instead he was marking time until summer. That's what prisoners do on walls. They mark the days until they go free. But if you're marking time as a teacher, you aren't redeeming the time with your students. A parent drops a child off at the beginning of the year and it's your job to redeem the time and educate that child. It's your responsibility to see that child progress throughout the year. The child should be a better student as a result of being in your classroom. You are responsible - for successes and failures - and you have an obligation to students and parents to redeem every precious minute you're given as an educator. — Tucker Elliot

Especially with our first child, we tend to take too much responsibility
both credit and blame
for everything. The more we wantto be good parents, the more we tend to see ourselves as making or breaking our children. — Polly Berrien Berends

As wonderful as they were, my parents didn't teach me anything about self-discipline, concentration, patience, or focus. If I hadn't had a family myself, I probably never would've done anything. Marriage taught me responsibility. — Dick Van Dyke

There are many things children accept as "grown-up things" over when they have no control and for which they have no responsibility
for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents' decision to live apart. — Fred Rogers

The truth is, it's impossible for any parent to know what his or her child will be like as an adult. But we can tell you that the sensory smart child of sensory smart parents is a person who is empowered to take responsibility for himself, for his body, and for his behavior. That's an outstanding quality any parent would be proud to see in a child. — Nancy Peske

I am responsible for my personal happiness. One of the characteristics of immaturity is the belief that it is someone else's job to make me happy - much as it was once my parents' job to keep me alive. If only someone would love me, then I would love myself. If only someone would take care of me, then I would be contented. If only someone would spare me the necessity of making decisions, then I would be carefree. If only someone would make me happy. Here's a simple but powerful stem to wake one up to reality: If I take full responsibility for my personal happiness - . Taking responsibility for my happiness is empowering. It places my life back in my own hands. Ahead of taking this responsibility, I may imagine it will be a burden. What I discover is that it sets me free. — Nathaniel Branden

True, we can learn much from observation of the failure of others without having to personally suffer the same pain, but the character and memory of the wisdom gained may be more acute and long-lasting from our own personal failures. Even worse is the generational fear of failure prevalent in our culture, resulting from parents carefully programming their offspring as young as three to participate in activities intended to cultivate intellectual and sports prowess which in their design do not allow for failure. Before children can feel the pain of their mistakes, the parents intervene and deflect the taking of personal responsibility by the child. We pay for it so they do not have to. This is the most dangerous thing we can do for them. — Kevin R. Anderson

As different as Emily Dickinson's parents' life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande's in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they'd raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state - something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande's life to Alice Hobson's? — Atul Gawande

Raising human offspring is an endeavor nothing less than a continued labor of patience, hard work, organization and ongoing adaptation. All of which is unlike that expected of any other living creatures on the planet (or this sector of the universe, as far as we can tell). It demands the most complex responsibility and long-term commitment of any parenting life-form. Indeed, it is at times, at least for quality parents, an overwhelming, exhausting, even daunting task. Albeit, one that in the end, (and, most of the time even in the middle of it), is more than worth it. — Connie Kerbs

The bringing up, as of a child; instruction; formation of manners. Education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties. — Noah Webster

Work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it. — Gordon B. Hinckley

For a while parents seemed to forget that their responsibility as parents did not cease when the child turned on the radio; rather it increases. In the August, 1938, issue of Your Life, Mary Linton has this to say to the parent who is blaming everyone but himself for his child's actions:
It isn't up to the teachers in the schools, nor the Federal Radio Commissioners, nor anyone else on earth. It's up to us - it's our job! Our job to teach them right from wrong, honesty from dishonesty, a clean and intelligent attitude toward sex, a healthful fastidiousness about their own bodies. We can teach these things because we have the daily opportunity of knowing our children and their reactions. — Judith C. Waller

I'm now nearly 79. At 16 I took responsibility for Tibet and lost my freedom. At 24 I lost my country and became a refugee. I've met difficulties, but as the saying goes: 'Wherever you're happy, you can call home, and whoever is kind to you is like your parents.' I've been happy and at home in the world at large. Living a meaningful life isn't just a matter of money; it's about dedicating your life to helping others. — Dalai Lama

A controlling God, who is usually represented by a controlling church leadership, is just not good news. How can church leadership create freedom and not more rules? How can we bring out the best in human beings and keep it at the surface even as we deal with their problems and shortcomings? Can we empower others and release them to live from their best natures and from the truest reasons they are alive? Will we as Christian leaders, parents, and employers take on the responsibility to learn how to draw out the dreams and destiny in the people we lead? — Danny Silk

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. — Melissa Harris-Perry

I remind everyone: Whether you school them at home or send them to school, you as a parent have the responsibility to make sure they learn and behave. Teachers and principals may help, but parents are the ones who must accept responsibility. — Ernest Istook

I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendents - those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to give America's youngsters the best possible education. We need the best teachers and enough of them to prepare our young people for a future immeasurably more complex than the present, and calling for ever larger numbers of competent and highly trained men and women. — Hyman Rickover

Half of teachers leave the profession within their first four years, and kids with behaviour challenges and their parents are cited as one of the major reasons. — Ross W. Greene

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? — Viktor E. Frankl

As parents, we have the responsibility and the power to create a foundational love for nutritious foods that will influence our children's choices for decades to come, setting the stage for our children, grandchildren, and future generations to flourish in wellness and health. — Leah Borski

There are only two things that determine whether you're old enough to do something -- whether you understand what the hell you're getting yourself into -- and whether you're willing to accept responsibility for it if it blows up in your face.
How many years you've been alive is ultimately meaningless -- except in as much as it gives parents a general sort of idea as to whether their child is likely to understand what they're getting themselves into. Small children, for instance, can't really comprehend shades of grey -- where a decision or choice can have different answers depending on the circumstances. For them, everything is black and white. — Midnight Blue

What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face
they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that. — Tyler Perry

Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe ... The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves. — David Elkind

As she worked, she remembered something her parents had said to her when Klaus was born, and against when they brought Sunny home from the hospital. 'you are the eldest Baudelaire child,' they had said, kindly but firmly. 'And as the eldest, it will always be your responsibility to look after your younger siblings. Promise us that you will always watch out for them and make sure they don't get into trouble. — Lemony Snicket

To this, it is countered that the same-sex conception of marriage and family is, and must be, parasitic upon the demise of conjugal society, wherein biological parents are not taking responsibility for the rearing and education of their own children. Having no natural justification, the dominion of two adults of the same sex over children in their custody is crucially dependent upon the state to enforce their claim to these children as against the claims of the biological parent(s). Same-sex marriage is necessarily a political form of social order, invoking the power of the state to make it so. — Jean Bethke Elshtain

I want to ask parents, when daughters turn 11 or 14, they keep a tab on their movements. Have these parents ever asked their sons where they have been going, who they have been meeting? Rapists are somebody's sons as well! Parents must take the responsibility to ensure that their sons don't go the wrong direction. — Narendra Modi

As parents and as consumers, we have the right and the power to pressure the entertainment industry to respond to our needs. Americans, after all, should insist that every corporate giant - whether it produces chemicals or records - accept responsibility for what it produces. — Tipper Gore

If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go. — Charles Portis

We hold in our arms the rising generation. They come to this earth with important responsibilities and great spiritual capacities. We cannot be casual in how we prepare them. Our challenge as parents and teachers is not to create a spiritual core in their souls but rather to fan the flame of their spiritual core already aglow with the fire of their premortal faith. — Neil L. Andersen

Family members provided a variety of support--physical, economic, emotional, and psychological... Parents opened bank accounts for their children, even those who were adult, away from home, married, and employed. And children who left Richmond to search for work elsewhere provided for the money in their savings accounts to be used by other relatives, if needed, during their absence. In all these ways African American women and men testified to the notion of family members as having a mutual and continuing responsibility to help each other and to prepare for hard times. — Elsa Barkley Brown

Children ... are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God's children. — Dirk Benedict

As a mom, I know it is my responsibility, and no one else's, to raise my kids. But we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids. — Michelle Obama

Being dismantled before our eyes are not just individual programs that politicians cite as too expensive but the whole idea that society has a stake in the well-being of children down the block and the security of families on the other side of town. Whether or not kids eat well, are nurtured and have a roof over their heads is not just a consequence of how their parents behave. It is also a responsibility of society
but now apparently a diminishing one. — Richard Stolley

I feel that each and every one of us as individuals has a responsibility to one another. None of us would be here without the help of someone else - whether it be guardians, teachers, parents, relatives, etc. - someone contributed to your well being as a person. We're all connected in so many different ways. — Alonzo Mourning

Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money (from their parents, crime, or the State). For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents? — Thomas Szasz

Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade - the only American in my class - when our teacher wrote the words "America" and "Atomic Bomb" in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates' mute disbelief and never have to face them again. — Linda Hoaglund

But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart. — C. G. Jung

Not infrequently, parents fail to help children grasp their responsibility for a community. Often we as parents don't convey to our children that they have obligations to small communities like a sports team or a school choir or a dance troupe. How many of us ever simply mention to our children that a school is not just a place to learn but a community, or that a neighborhood is a community that carries obligations? — Richard Weissbourd

Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great- grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility. — Alice Miller

Part of our responsibility as parents, as adults, is to set examples for children. But we have to like children in order to be really happy fulfilled adults. — Bobby McFerrin

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Poverty drove their parents to have them castrated as young children, hoping they would earn a better living at court. Usually the father would take the boy to a specialist castrator, who operated by the appointment of the court. After a contract was signed, absolving the castrator from any responsibility in case of death or failure (both highly likely outcomes), the unimaginably painful operation was performed. The castrator's fee was huge and had to be paid from future earnings. — Jung Chang

My grandmother was also an active member of the tenants association and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party, and both of my parents were extremely liberal, so I think I grew up in a household that was very politically conscious - we all watched the elections on TV, and we watched the debates. So it was an awareness that we were raised with, and as we grew into young adults, we just naturally became politically active. It was just understood that it was important, that it was our responsibility. — Scarlett Johansson

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology,3 researchers asked eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds which criteria they felt were most indicative of adulthood. Their criteria were, in order of importance: (1) accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions; (2) establishing a relationship with parents as an equal adult; (3) being financially independent from parents; and (4) deciding on beliefs/values independently of parents/other influences. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

Boys who grow up seeing themselves everywhere as powerful and central just by virtue of being boys, often white, are critically impaired in many ways. It's a rude shock to many when things don't turn out the way they were told they should. It seems reasonable to suggest media misrepresentations like these contribute, in boys, to a heightened inability to empathize with others, a greater propensity to peg ambition to intrinsic qualities instead of effort and a failure to understand why rules apply or why accountability is a thing. It should mean something to parents that the teenagers with the highest likelihood of sexually assaulting a peer and feel no responsibility for their actions are young white boys from higher-income families. The real boy crisis we should be talking about is entitlement and outdated notions of masculinity, both of which are persistently responsible for leaving boys confused and unprepared for contemporary adulthood. — Soraya Chemaly

Parents have no greater responsibility in this world than the bringing up of their children in the right way, and they will have no greater satisfaction as the years pass than to see those children grow in integrity and honesty and make something of their lives. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Many parents as well as teachers refuse to place this responsibility upon children for fear of the mistakes that they will make. On account of this fear they make it as nearly as possible unnecessary for children to judge freely, by giving them arbitrary rules to follow, or by directing them exactly what they shall do each moment. This cultivates poor judgment by depriving children of the very practice that will make their judgments reliable; it prevents the school requirements from corresponding to those in life outside. — Frank Morton McMurry

We, as parents, must understand the serious responsibility that we have in inculcating love for God in the hearts of children. If our children do not feel love they will not understand God's love because the love of the parent is translated to the children as the love of God. When they feel their parents' love, they can actually begin to understand God's love. — Radhanath Swami

Our lives were short, and we never would have wanted to have them be shorter. Sometimes perspective comes far too late. You cannot trust yourself. You think you can, but you can't. Not because you are selfish. You cannot live for anyone else's sake. As much as you may want to, you can't stay alive just because other people want you alive. You cannot stay alive for your parents. You cannot stay alive for your friends. And you have no responsibility to stay alive for them. You have no responsibility to anyone but yourself to live. — David Levithan

My parents never condescended to me. As a child, I always sat at the head of our dinner table. I was always given a lot of responsibility. — Claire Danes

It is said that "neurotics make themselves miserable; those with character disorders make everyone else miserable." Chief among the people character-disordered parents make miserable are their children. As in other areas of their lives, they fail to assume adequate responsibility for their parenting. They tend to brush off their children in thousands of little ways rather than provide them with needed attention. — M. Scott Peck

Both men and women who have children as a rule regulate their lives largely with reference to them, and children cause perfectly ordinary men and women to act unselfishly in certain ways, of which perhaps life insurance is the most definite and measurable. — Bertrand Russell

Concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he's bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It's not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer. — Malcolm Gladwell

Adoptive parents are taking on enormous responsibility, both emotionally and financially. Quite frankly, they need as much disclosure as possible about the child's background and health to assure the best fit and be prepared. — Pat Robertson

Perhaps one reason that many working parents do not agitate for collective reform, such as more governmental or corporate child care, is that the parents fear, deep down, that to share responsibility for child rearing is to abdicate it. — Faye J Crosby

Some people argue that teaching children financial basics is the parents' job. However, this well-meant sentiment is what we're relying on now, and for all too many, it isn't working. In some families, financial illiteracy is passed on from generation to generation. Education takes place in the home, on the streets, and in the schools. Therefore, schools must bear some responsibility for teaching this skill. However, if you're raising children, remember that no one cares as much as you do or has as much ability to teach the important life skill of personal money management. — Eric Tyson

Charity is not a virtue to expect in others only. It is the all-important Christian attribute to be found in ourselves ... We believe that charity must begin at home. Can we hope to be charitable to the stranger if love does not abound in the family? A sure step in the direction of improvement and progress in our own lives comes when we share with mother or father in their dependence as they shared with us in their productive years ... We cannot as children ignore our obligations to our parents by passing responsibility for their care to others ... — Henry D. Moyle

When we are babies ... we need an authoritative figure to guide and take care of us. We ask no questions about that authority and imagine that the small circumference of family life is the limit of the universe ... As we mature, our horizon expands and we begin to question. This continues until we either throw over our creators
our parents
for good and take their place as the creative force in our lives or find replacements for them because the terror and responsibility are too great. People go one way or the other, and this accounts for all of the great personal and political divides throughout history. — Charlotte Rogan

As these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history - the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. Indeed, in many poor countries with high infant death rates, like India, the desire to assure oneself of progeny who can provide support in old age is a major reason for high birth rates and large families. The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal - earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them. — Milton Friedman