Quotes by Journalists - Page 175

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.
Sydney J. Harris
And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respect, without conflict and without resentment. It is the hardest lesson to learn that the goal of parenthood is not to reign forever but to abdicate gracefully at the right time.
Sydney J. Harris
And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.
Sydney J. Harris
I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as "symbols" of family life. What they want are ideal children, not real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected.
Sydney J. Harris
Genuine love for a child, it seems to me, must include a desire for his maturity and ultimately his independence. WAtching a personality unfold is perhaps the deepest pleasure of parenthood; wishing, or trying, to retard this growth is one of the deepest sins.
Sydney J. Harris
At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.
Sydney J. Harris
To raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren't so damned important.
Jonathan V Last
Never tell a child that something it’s too hard
Mitch Albom
He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.
Vasily Grossman
Zehrunisa didn’t know Abdul’s age herself. Seventeen was what she’d said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn’t keep track of a child’s years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.
Katherine Boo
We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.
Drew Magary
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
Joan Didion
Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.
Michael Lewis
The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
Aleksandar Hemon
In the end, the slow decay of the body didn't matter. We all continue on, renewing ourselves, through our offspring. They are what matter. They are what survives.
Andy Lane
Ever seen a two-year-old tattering around a garden? There might be a poison ivy, or rose bushes or hawthorne around the edges. There might be spades or secateurs lying on the lawn. The kid doesn't care. He just wants to play with all those brightly coloured things he sees. To him, the world is a safe place. And you might want to rush out and cut back all those sharp spiky plants so they can't hurt him, and you might want to clear away all those dangerous tools just in case, he picks them up and cut himself on them, but you know you shouldn't because if you keep doing that then he either will grow up thinking the can never hurt him, or he might go the other way, and think that everything is dangerous, and he should never go far from your side. So you just watch. And wait. And if he does get rush from the poison ivy or if he does cut his fingers off with the secateurs, then you get him to the hospital as quickly as you can, in the reasonably sure knowledge the he'll never make the same mistake again.
Andy Lane
...he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called 'strange.' A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.
Djuna Barnes
We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.
Joan Didion
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
Joan Didion
Mom was adamantly pro-choice. She had a bumper sticker on the car that read If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child? But in her case the choice was to keep me.
Gayle Forman
Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.
Joyce Maynard
Having a child isn't a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death
Carsten Jensen
Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children... And when researchers bother to ask questions of a more existential nature, they find that parents report greater feelings of meaning and reward -- which to many parents is what the entire shebang is about.
Jennifer Senior
The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents.
William Stolzenburg
If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.
Nick Joaquín
And if that's the case -- if we are our remembering selves -- then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.
Jennifer Senior
We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self.
Jennifer Senior
The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you'd be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
Jojo Moyes
Morals do exist outside of organized religion, and the ‘morality’ taught by many of these archaic systems is often outdated, sexist, racist, and teaches intolerance and inequality. When a parent forces a child into a religion, the parent is effectively handicapping his or her own offspring by limiting the abilities of the child to question the world around him or her and make informed decisions. Children raised under these conditions will mature believing that their religion is the only correct one, and, in the case of Christianity, they will believe that all who doubt their religion’s validity will suffer eternal damnation. This environment is one that often breeds hate, ignorance, and ‘justified’ violence.
David G. McAfee
In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class husband and wife or a single parent over $10,000 a year.
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is "fair". Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being "selfish" and "greedy". Later in life he will thank you.
Joseph Sobran
But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.
Gabriel García Márquez
Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.
Mitch Albom
What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.
Sarah Jio
We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt. "Don't be childish, darling." "I hope to Christ I am. Don't be childish yourself." It is possible to be grateful that no one that you would willingly associate with you say, "Be mature. Be well-balanced, be well-adjusted." Africa, being as old as it is, makes all people except the professional invaders and spoilers into children. No one says to anyone in Africa, "Why don't you grow up?" . . . Men know that they are children in relation to the country and, as in armies, seniority and senility ride close together. But to have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor. A man must comport himself as a man. . . . But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.
Ernest Hemingway
Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.
Mignon McLaughlin
An educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents’ and his grandparents’ generation have got through molding it. We can’t help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn you:Remember we really don’t know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.
Lincoln Steffens
The seed of a blue lupin will usually produce a blue lupin. But the seed of a blue-eyed man may produce a brown-eyed bore...especially if his wife has a taste for gigolos.
Beverley Nichols
It’s easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child—at least till you try to get him to do something.
Mignon McLaughlin
One day I have a revelation. ‘I think we’re actually quite compatible,’ I tell him. ‘You’re irritable, and I’m irritating.
Pamela Druckerman
Attachment parenting, Sears writes, "immunizes children against many of the social and emotional diseases which plague our society," producing children who are "compassionate," "caring," "admirable," "affectionate," "confident," and "accomplished" ("faster than a speeding bullet," "more powerful than a locomotive," and "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" seem to have been left off the list!).
Emily Matchar
we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.
Aleksandar Hemon
Her conclusion: "You just have to follow your own heart" when it comes to medical decision-making.
Emily Matchar
Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can't get enough sugar from Chocolate.I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good.
Charles M. Blow
There are two things that grant a bit of immortality: books and children
Tiziano Terzani
Every book has it's destiny, Like a human life , Sometime when an Author is dead the destiny of the book begins" The days of Childhood !!!!!
Tushar Upreti
Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn't always require the parent's active involvement. It can come from staring at the sky, smelling dinner as it's being prepared, or playing alone on a blanket. It's a way of sharpening the child's senses and preparing him to distinguish between different experiences. It's the first step toward teaching him to be a cultivated adult who knows how to enjoy himself. Awakening is a kind of training for children in how to profiter - to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment.
Pamela Druckerman
You may hate being pregnant, but the minute the baby is born, she is God's precious child, given to you as a gift.
Sandra Dallas
Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women - presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on and on...
Caitlin Moran
However, what I do believe to genuinely sacred - and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole - is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. It's those unhappy, unwanted children, who then grew into angry adults, who have caused the great majority of humankind's miseries. They are the ones who make states feel feral; streets dangerous; relationships violent.
Caitlin Moran
The next parent who Googles Is my 2-year-old gifted? should get a curt response: Your 2-year-old is a gift.
Ron Fournier
Having to explain to a child of today, who has learned to swipe before they can speak, that certain aspects of a person’s life must remain private for the preservation of one’s sanity is almost frivolous.
Aysha Taryam
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
Albert Camus
A generation of children is not only being raised indoors, but is being confined to even smaller spaces. Jane Clark, a University of Maryland professor of kinesiology . . . calls them "containerized kids"--they spend more and more time in car seats, high chairs, and even baby seats for watching TV. When small children go outside, they're often placed in containers--strollers--and pushed by walking or jogging parents. . . Most kid-containerizing is done for safety concerns, but the long term health of these children is compromised. (35)
Richard Louv
In my meditations, I find that nothing in life counts more than the happiness we can give others, the good that we can do. This is what we must teach our children, to think of others more than they think of themselves, for it is in this way they will find the most noble satisfaction of all. ~ Maurice Drouhin writing to his wife from prison in 1941
Don Kladstrup
Children read their favorite books to death, she said. They are careless in their devotions. They rip the pages, scribble, and spill things on them. And they are demon book thieves.
Jean Nathan
Love your children while they are young. Because they grow up soon enough, and then… then the have no need of you.
Robert Ferrigno
We're only happy--truly happy--when it's forever after, but only children live in a world where things can last forever.
José Eduardo Agualusa
The roses started him thinking, how the oddity of them was beautiful and how that oddity was contrived to give them value. “It just struck me – clear and complete all at once – no long figuring about it.” He realized that children could be designed. “And I thought to myself, now that would a rose garden worthy of a man’s interest.”We children would smile and hug him and he would grin around at us and send the twins for a pot of cocoa from the drink wagon and me for a bag of popcorn because the red-haired girls would just throw it out when they finished closing the concession anyway. And we would all be cozy in the warm booth of the van, eating popcorn and drinking cocoa and feeling like Papa’s roses.
Katherine Dunn
Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they're about to no longer be.
Jennifer Senior