#parent

We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#security

I'll never forget the stillness, the hesitation, and a trace of something I'd never before seen on Ghosh's face: cunning. Then it gave in to resignation and a faraway look. For a moment I saw the world through his eyes, his intellect, his sweeping vision...a vision that recapitulated our birth and looked to the future, looked past his life to the end of mine and beyond. And then and only then did it settle, gather, and focus, on the now, on a moment when the love was so palpable between father and son that the thought that it might end, and this memory be its only legacy, was unacceptable. ↗

— Abraham Verghese

#life

I've been alone since my mom met Scott. He sucked the nectar from her heart like a famished butterfly. No nurture, no nourishment left for Kristina. A vacation is a poor substitute for love. ↗

— Ellen Hopkins

#parents #teen #life

Yes it's true, you wake the child inside of you up because you're a Mom! ↗

— Sandra Chami Kassis

#life #motherhood #mothers #parenting #wisdom

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. ↗

— John Updike

#life #parenthood #life

The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self esteem intact while he is in school. That is the real risk to his success and to his mental health. Once he's out of school, the world will be different. He'll find a niche where the fact that he can't spell well or didn't read until he was eight, won't matter. But if he starts to hate himself because he isn't good at schoolwork, he'll fall into a hole that he'll be digging himself out of for the rest of his life. ↗

— Dan Kindlon

#parenting #life

If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#learning #life #mistakes #nature #parenting

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it. ↗

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#love #parents #void #life

The debt we owe our parents can never be squared, and jolly good too, because doing so would threaten to nullify all relationship, all emotional commerce between the two generations. Being in debt, just like being in credit, means an active interest applies between the two parties and, once the debt is taken care of, the interest is bound to wane. ↗

— Robert Rowland Smith

#family-relationships #parenthood #family

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#duty #parents #life