673 Quotes About Parenthood

Too close supervision stifles the mental growth of children.

My little Pierre is now nearly five years old. He is quite a big boy. I used to wait with impatience for the time when I could take him with me and talk with him, opening his young mind, instilling into him the love of beauty and truth, and helping fashion for him so lofty a soul that the ugliness of life could not degrade it.

Don’t count on others’ love for you. If you inadvertently lose their respect, they will intentionally spare you out of their lives

Moral dilemmas are not to test your manners, but to teach you a good lesson. It’s your choice to understand it or not

Words have no meaning if they’re not exposed to action. Action has no power if it’s not interpreted to words.

Most kids would not respect their parents as much as they do, or even at all, if they knew how intellectually undemanding is the role they played in their creation.

It is impossible to bring a child into this world for its own sake.

It is insufficient to only tell your children that racism and racists are bad. It is insufficient to simply explain “We love people of all colors.” It is lazy and near damaging to proclaim a love for all people but never make the leap of actually reaching out to people of color or adding tangible diversity to your life. In a world filled with empty rhetoric, our children don’t need to hear words from us without action. They need to see us embody the beliefs we claim to hold dear.

I know hiding your prejudice behind your ignorance isn’t enough. Because I have been the mom scrambling to provide my four-year-old with a somewhat intelligent, unproblematic answer when he went through a phase of questioning bindis (and fashioning his own replicas out of modeling clay). Ignoring things I don’t understand can’t be an option given that I am guiding the next generation.