#parenting

While I was drying off Maddie after her bath tonight, she said, 'I love you' to me for the first time. It sounded like 'All lub boo,' but I didn't care. To reciprocate, I showed her what an ex-Marine looks like when he cries. ↗

— Jim Beaver

#humor #love #parenting #humor

If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding...and snatch an opportunity to shape character. ↗

— Jane Clayson Johnson

#parenting #inspirational

Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger's touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body. But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am," and forms the core of personality. In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And "I am" grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh. The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves. In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and fixes the facets of the soul, until "I am" is set, delicate and detailed as an insect in amber.

— Diana Gabaldon

#children #motherhood #parenting #vulnerability #love

Unconditional parental love is the indespensible nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love - in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost...The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love. ↗

— Gordon Neufeld

#love

In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends. ↗

— Padma Lakshmi

#also #am #aunts #cousins #daughter

I wasn't very good about juggling family and my career. I was interested in who was coming to the children's birthday party, what my son was writing. I was thinking about Legos. ↗

— Jill Clayburgh

#about #birthday #birthday party #career #children

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children. ↗

— Bill Cosby

#childhood #children #fatherhood #learned #lessons

It's a huge change for your body. You don't even want to look in the mirror after you've had a baby, because your stomach is just hanging there like a Shar-Pei. ↗

— Cindy Crawford

#after #baby #because #body #change

If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn . . . If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight . . . If a child lives with fear, he learns to be apprehensive . . . If a child lives with pity, he learns to feel sorry for himself . . . If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy . . . If a child lives with jealousy, he learns to feel envy . . . If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty ... BUT If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient . . . If a child lives with encouragement, he learns to be confident . . . If a child lives with praise, he learns to be appreciative . . . If a child lives with acceptance, he learns to love . . If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.. If a child lives with honesty, he learns what truth is . . . If a child lives with fairness, he learns justice . . . If children live with recognition, they learn to have a goal. If children live with sharing, they learn to be generous. If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith in himself and those about him . . . If a child lives with friendliness, he learns the world is a nice place in which to live . . . ↗

— Dorothy Law Nolte

#parenting-children #faith

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult. ↗

— Louise Erdrich

#family #parenting #family