quotations about children
In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.
BILL COSBY
Fatherhood
Boys have a period of mischief as much as they have measles or chicken-pox.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. 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.
WALT DISNEY
Deeds Rather Than Words
Love not your children unequally; or if you do, show it not, lest you make the one proud, and the other envious, and both fools.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Alligators have the right idea ... they eat their young.
IDA CORWIN
Mildred Pierce
That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, The Quotable Walt Disney
Keep thou an open door between thy child's life and thine own.
MAUD LINDSAY
"The Closing Door", Mother Stories
We know not what the child may become.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is better to have only one son endowed with good qualities than a hundred devoid of them. For the moon though one, dispels the darkness, which the stars, though numerous, do not.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
Families with babies, and families without babies, are so sorry for each other.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
We know that the outcasts and misfits are the children most likely to become violent, so it only follows that we must pull them into the arms of love and/or acceptance, and find a place where they fit. If our system doesn't have a place where a child fits, there's something wrong with the system, not the child.
WILLIAM G. DEFOORE
Anger
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
ERMA BOMBECK
attributed, Forbes, 1991
Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
A Good Enough Parent
She cannot understand how any woman should not want children, to be her companions and to trust in her, love her, reverence her; children whom she may nurse, protect, teach, guide, govern, mold into manhood and womanhood. To have this possession has been her dream ever since with alternate tenderness and severity she ruled her dolls. The hoped-for hour has come. She welcomes it with a gladsome awe. As she prepares to enter the unknown experience of motherhood, her heart is stirred, but more deeply, with all the glad apprehension with which she entered married life as bride. She goes to that mystic gateway which opens into the infinite beyond, and receives into her keeping God's gift of a little child. She wonders at the Father's confidence in her, wonders that He dares to trust so sacred a task to her care. But one child is not enough. She wishes a brood. The Oriental passion of motherhood possesses her. Another child is given to her, a third, a fourth. They cluster about her, sharing with each other and with her their songs and their sorrows, their toils and their sports. The Holy Family has reappeared again. No old master ever painted such a group; no Raphael ever interpreted, no painter could interpret, her holy gladness.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Setting a good example for your children does nothing but increase their embarrassment.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, Quotable Quotes: Wit and Wisdom from the Greatest Minds of Our Time
If a child is given love, he becomes loving ... If he's helped when he needs help, he becomes helpful. And if he has been truly valued at home ... he grows up secure enough to look beyond himself to the welfare of others.
DR. JOYCE BROTHERS
Good Housekeeping, Aug. 2010
A strange mixture of fear and joy comes with driving off from the hospital with your firstborn in the vehicle. There's a powerful sense of transition and new beginning, and yet fear as well. It's a fear closely attached to the question, "What do I do with this thing?" It's a healthy fear born out of an awareness of the fragility of new life.
CHRIS SEIDMAN
Little Buddy
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Millstone
Few are fit to train monkeys, yet not one of us but thinks himself competent to bring up children.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims