Quotes About Being Parents

#1. I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents! It's an art form. I talk a lot. And I think a lot. And I draw a lot. But never in a million years would I have been a parent. That's just work that's too hard.

Maurice Sendak

#2. Because of the fact that we've been through so much, we're going to appreciate every step of being parents. I think we're going to savor it and cherish it and we're going to be the best parents we can be.

Bill Rancic

#3. But who could teach daughters how to fly? Parents were by definition earthbound, grub eaters, feet in their own coffins, by dint of being parents.

Gregory Maguire

#4. It started with a simple ring,
You became husband and wife,
You progressed to being parents
And you're still best friends for life.

John Walter Bratton

#5. I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents.

Marian Wright Edelman

#6. After my parents' divorce when I was 4, I spent weekends with my dad before we finally moved to California. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was incapable of enjoying the day's activities, of being in the moment, because I was already dreading the inevitable goodbye of Sunday evening.

Rob Lowe

#7. I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true.

Sarah Vowell

#8. Take it from me, anyone who lives with you is occasionally going to wonder who your liver might taste, and not because they are hungry. It comes with being a teenager - you inspire violence in the hearts of those who love you. It mostly goes away when you hit twenty.

Patricia Briggs

#9. My heroes always are mostly my parents - my father especially, and my mom, who's passed on already. My dad is a very strong man, and by him being educated, and a principal and school superintendent over 37 years, he plays such a big role in my life.

Dikembe Mutombo

#10. Being Jewish means loving something that's gone. Your parents, your grandparents, the place they came from. Jerusalem itself. Creation.

Michael Davidow

#11. And she didn't once say anything about this being a sin. It used to be I got the word sin slapped in my face every time I did something wrong, but come on, when you live in a sin-free family with sin-free parents and a sin-free sister, well, you can't help but sin a little extra on their behalf.

Han Nolan

#12. Being a soldier [in the wars of modern power politics] was like being on a team in a sport that drew no crowds, except for the players' own parents and friends.

Dan Wakefield

#13. When we lived in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, my sister and I did a local play. My whole family got involved. My mom did the makeup. My sister and I were being homeschooled, and my parents wanted us to be socialized. We had a lot of fun with the other kids hanging out backstage.

Danielle Panabaker

#14. You have to understand - I grew up being told by my parents that the best way to get out of a sticky situation was to assume it didn't exist," he said. "Let the rumors fly ... if the family isn't bothered, why should anyone else be?

Jodi Picoult

#15. I don't ever remember being able to debate with my parents. Even though I thought of myself as a very bright kid, I couldn't be vocal in that way.

Mindy Kaling

#16. When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

Sonia Sotomayor

#17. Better to scratch the wound than bandage it: those who lose a child shouldn't be consoled; parents die to make room for their kids, not the other way around. He wasn't being cruel, he just thought a gash that deep had to be respected, not swaddled over with cuddles.

Yuri Herrera

#18. My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

James Denton

#19. Being kind is the most important thing I've ever been taught. That's what my parents always told me - more important than ambition or success is being kind to people. The cornerstone of my life. What I aspire to is to be kind.

Rafe Spall

#20. There's a kind of mystery to our being and from my point of view, regarding my own parents and their parents, I'd as soon let it lie than find out who my mother's father was.

T.C. Boyle

#21. A child is being properly educated only when he is learning to become independent of his parents.

Hyman Rickover

#22. Not a word. Being a hypocrite is the only way people who were once teenagers can be parents without going out of their damn minds.

DiscontentedWinter

#23. You're being parental', I said. 'Go find that squid'.

Daryl Gregory

#24. Unfortunately, violence begets violence. And this is how the war on terrorism seems to be going at this juncture. A lot of people are losing their lives. Many children are losing their parents. Too many houses are being destroyed. And, unfortunately, the arms industry seems to flourish.

Shirin Ebadi

#25. I've wanted to act since I was little, but my parents told me I couldn't pursue it until after college. The understanding was that I was lucky enough to be able to go to college and that it's important to being successful in life.

Allison Williams

#26. Instead I'm worried about my son being led astray by a harlot. A harlot named Brooklyn. Her parents probably named her that because skank was too obvious even though they know what her future career would be.

Tara Sivec

#27. As for their child, I am moved in two ways. He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and so overcome.

Pearl S. Buck

#28. Mom actually said that?" Cassie's face shown with happiness. "She always hated my math!"
"Nah," Martin said. "She was just being that way for you. She thought it was what you needed to hear. If parents told us what they really think about stuff, we could figure them out like regular people.

Clare B. Dunkle

#29. I am not asking anyone to take the fun out of childhood. As we all know, treats are one of the best parts of being a kid. Instead, the goal here is to empower parents instead of undermining them as they try to make healthier choices for their families.

Michelle Obama

#30. I worked with my parents on the stage in production numbers since I was 4, but I never really gave much thought to being a performer on my own until I was 12 or 13.

Helen Reddy

#31. Parents are the designated caregivers and are best suited for being able to raise children.

Gordon Neufeld

#32. Many of our newly smart would rather be found murdering their children than being kind to their parents. They would prefer to be damned for rudeness than to be snickered at for courtesy.

Irwin Edman

#33. Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#34. I never thought I'd be a role model this early. It caught me off-guard, but it says a lot about how I was brought up, what my values have been, and how my parents raised me. It's very flattering that being myself is enough to be a role model.

Danica Patrick

#35. The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents - because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

Frank Zappa

#36. I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically. Vitally.

Erykah Badu

#37. Still, he was another guy in the house, and Mom was mine first, and her being my mom is a thousand times more important than her being some guy's girlfriend. So even though Booth wasn't trying to run the show, he was still in the way.

Jack Gantos

#38. The law of the [Cub Scout] pack guides the boys to move in the direction of being helpful, friendly, courteous, trustworthy and promote qualities which parents and the community are looking for. The whole purpose of scouting is to help the children grow up making good decisions in life.

John C. Maxwell

#39. I wish my parents had spent more time worrying about my education than me being a star.

Shania Twain

#40. I get bitter, angry and disbelieving and I tell my kids there a lot of idiots out there. I also want them to know that being successful is not the real world - that their parents get treated better because they're on TV.

Al Roker

#41. When I was younger, I just thought that my plans were probably going to be more exciting than my parents' plans or the establishment. I sort of got by on being a little bit of a rebel.

Amy Grant

#42. Don't misunderstand. There is no abandoning, or being abandoning. And you're not owned by your parents, either. You should understand ... that you have no other master besides yourself. No one was forcing you to wait for a slow death ... in such a lonely place.

Minari Endou

#43. Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not being driven to succeed where their parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, or a somebody.

Guy Davenport

#44. I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Stephen King

#45. When you become a parent, you look at your parents differently. You look at being a child differently. It's an awakening, a revelation that you have.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#46. I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.

Jan Koum

#47. Listen, there is no way any true man is going to let children live around him in his home and not discipline and teach, fight and mold them until they know all he knows. His goal is to make them better than he is. Being their friend is a distant second to this.

Victor Devlin

#48. I always loved being in London and being near my parents.

Sophie Winkleman

#49. I think it's really important for my daughter to see her parents being physically fit and for that to be a part of her life. The examples we set for her will stay with her the rest of her life.

Ana Ortiz

#50. Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

Noah Baumbach

#51. In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.

Robert Benton

#52. Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.

Helen Fielding

#53. How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation - like Charles Manson.

James Hillman

#54. I was just a kid and I didn't have a dad. That's hard, because when you're a kid, you blame yourself for everything. And I blamed myself for him not being around, for my parents not being together.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers

#55. Doesn't matter whether it's a teen girl who's pregnant, hasn't told her parents, or an elderly couple dealing with one of them being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Those are real people to me. Those are the people I dealt with every single day.

Mike Huckabee

#56. I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen.

Mike Medavoy

#57. The Germans were still hunting Alek, trying to finish the job they'd started on his parents. Someone had to be on his side.
And, as Deryn had gradually admitted to herself these last few days, she didn't mind if that someone wound up being her.

Scott Westerfeld

#58. I have my parents to thank for that, they raised me to be active and play all sports. They taught me the importance of staying healthy, being focused and setting goals in whatever I do.

Kiana Tom

#59. During a visit to California, when a friend of my grandmother's told my parents that I must be deaf because I was not responding to sounds, my father was absolutely convinced that I was simply being stubborn.

Marlee Matlin

#60. None of them even know who they are. They're just acting out their roles. Being what their parents made them. Always trying to be what's expected. It's exhausting.

Marie Sexton

#61. Parents don't have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and Parenthood so utterly beautiful: the All or nothing wager. The Faith.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#62. Robin Simon, a sociology professor at Florida State University and researcher on parenting and happiness, told The Daily Beast in 20083 that parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers.

Jessica Valenti

#63. I never once doubted that my parents cared about my thoughts and my ideas. And I always, always knew how deeply they loved me. That feeling of being valued and loved, that's what my mom wants for every child.

Chelsea Clinton

#64. I have the support of my parents and my teachers. They made it very possible for me to go to a school that is open and supportive of me being gone at times and pursuing acting. But school always comes first for me.

Yara Shahidi

#65. People lament that there's no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don't want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don't get it both ways.

Aasif Mandvi

#66. Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.

Wendy Wasserstein

#67. The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

Douglas Kennedy

#68. If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

Rachel Johnson

#69. To make extra money, my parents would sell eggs and chickens. I was very little. I remember a chicken's head being chopped off with the chicken running around. I wasn't sure if my imagination was running away with me or if it really happened. It really happened.

Michael Keaton

#70. I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?

Mary Ellen Mark

#71. Parents have bought into the world's pastimes chock-full of pop culture, and it is searing the souls of our children. Parents have allowed electronic babysitters to infiltrate their homes and minds; young people's sense of right and wrong is being choked by wild and rank weeds in a moral wasteland.

Billy Graham

#72. My parents played bridge, and I remember being fascinated watching them. I sometimes got a chance to sit in on a hand, which I loved. But then I didn't actually play on my own for about 30 years.

Louis Sachar

#73. Parents have the glorious opportunity of being the most powerful influence, above and beyond any other, on the new lives that bless their homes.

L. Tom Perry

#74. I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.

Elle Lothlorien

#75. I liked Pat Cash, and I loved Mats Wilander. I went to the Australian Open with my parents, and I used to watch Wilander being cheered on by the Swedish fans, and with his game style being like mine, I drew comparisons with him.

Lleyton Hewitt

#76. Many students described their parents' support in nonacademic activities as being equal to their support in school. Importantly, they felt this support was instrumental in helping them do well academically because it was viewed as a general interest in their life overall

Keith Robinson

#77. I've always believed that the desire must come from within, not as a result of being driven by coaches or parents.

Dawn Fraser

#78. Being Latin parents makes us extremely expressive with our affections.

Gloria Estefan

#79. I think my parents had in mind that I would settle down at quite a young age, but I decided that being a housewife in a big country house wasn't for me. I wanted to leave the country, head for London and see what the world had to offer.

Alison Jackson

#80. I take the academic education as seriously as the physical education. That's why I tell parents that the schools can't do it all themselves. The parents can't come home from work and turn on the TV. That's not being a good parent.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#81. If you count my childhood appearances in a few TV shows and being the son of two well-known actor parents in the U.K., plus three years of drama school, you could say that I've been pretty much surrounded by the business of acting and performing my entire life.

Linus Roache

#82. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn't even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it.

Paul Ryan

#83. Parents who engage in this kind of [conscious] parenting understand the power of being present being mindful to take the time to build connection understanding that this foundation is the bedrock of all later self-worth, self-esteem and self-actualization.

Shefali Tsabary

#84. We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.

Alice Miller

#85. Being an actress wasn't realistic. I knew that I was going to have to do it in a way that would speak to my parents. So I went to NYU Tisch School of the Arts for theater, and I studied at the conservatory.

Gina Rodriguez

#86. I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be.

Tracy Chevalier

#87. Being a teenager is chaotic because you're kind of coming into your own, but you're not an adult; you're fighting with your parents over responsibilities and freedom.

Troian Bellisario

#88. My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.

Daniel H. Pink

#89. Many neglected and abused children grow up to be adults who are afraid to take risks of striking out on their own. Many will remain dependent on their abusive parents and unable to separate from them. Others leave their abusive parents only to attach themselves to a partner who is controlling.

Beverly Engel

#90. Every day I look for ways to be inspired, to learn and to grow. And trying to be the best for my kids, my husband and my family. One thing I really wanna do is being there for my kids, be part of my siblings and my parents.

Mia Hamm

#91. Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.

Dan Savage

#92. Being gay is harder than being black. I didn't have to come out black. I didn't have to tell my parents about what its like to be black.

Wanda Sykes

#93. Years later I applied for Oxford University, and I suppose you could say that in this way I escaped from my parents. Being their sole child had become too complicated.

Rachel Joyce

#94. Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being "normal" and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.

Alexandra Robbins

#95. But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites.

Junius Williams

#96. I got a naughty thrill out of listening to music that was that dirty, especially being that young and able to listen to it around my parents. Kids would come over to my house to listen to Too $hort records.

Moshe Kasher

#97. ...being around him wasn't good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum - it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he'd come.

Lev Grossman

#98. Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

Sara Sheridan

#99. I got a lot of support from my parents. That's the one thing I always appreciated. They didn't tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.

Jim Carrey

#100. I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it.

Ken Follett