#parenting

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

To me luxury is to be at home with my daughter, and the occasional massage doesn't hurt. ↗

— Olivia Newton-John

#daughter #home #hurt #luxury #massage

Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a 'moral hazard,' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#again #bad #bailed #bailout #bank

What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all. ↗

— Benjamin Spock

#after #babies #best #doing #fathers

The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering. ↗

— Benjamin Spock

#child #parents #power #steering #supplies

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist. ↗

— Michael Levine

#parenting

To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, "I will is more important than IQ." It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it's been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to success and happiness. Discipline, hard work, perserverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important. ↗

— Rafe Esquith

#parenting #education

At what age did I start to think that where I was going was more important than where I already was? When was it that I began to believe that the most important thing about what I was doing was getting it over with? Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them. ↗

— Colin Beavan

#parenting #teaching #age

For a child, it is in the simplicity of play that the complexity of life is sorted like puzzle pieces joined together to make sense of the world. ↗

— L.R. Knost

#children #motherhood #parenting #play #age

As we embrace the mystery of love, we see that it contains not an absence of error, but the presence of grace. It contains not the absence of anger or pain, but the presence of forgiveness and healing. Not the absence of disharmony or confusion, but the presence of peace and clarity. To make a home into a sanctuary, we must be willing to make room in our hearts for one another's limitations, as well as our gifts. For it is here in this sacred space of the home and family, so brimming with life, so full of every emotion available to our hearts, that we learn what it means to love within all the nuances of an intimate relationship. ↗

— Shea Darian

#children #family #forgiveness #home #love