I’m the kind of parent who asks my kids questions like, ‘What would be your ideal thing to do in the summer?’
It’s so very important as to what a child watches on TV. I feel for every parent that knows this, and cares, because they only have control of the child’s viewing to a certain point.
Every pastor, youth pastor, and every parent is in competition with the Internet and the information it is spreading. Most young people don’t get their news from CNN or CBS; they get it from bloggers.
I did three DVD’s for ‘Baby Einstein,’ teaching babies how to sign. It really helps a parent communicate because babies can’t talk. But it has been proven that they can communicate using their hands to communicate. So sign language is a great tool in that way.
Losing a parent is a hard thing… I often sit here and think it would be great if mum and dad were alive and had a chance to see their grandkids grow up.
I appreciate my journey, but I don’t want that for my kid. Not any of it. It has nothing to do with whether I liked my childhood. I really did. But as a parent, that isn’t the childhood that I’d provide.
There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child’s universe.
What parent has it easy? I just never make the difficulty of it an obstacle. I just do it.
It’s a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.
Women have nine months more experience than you do – nine months to prepare for being a parent.
When I was a kid, we called every teacher, every parent – anyone over the age of 20, it seemed – ‘Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so.’
The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren’t always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I’ve come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as ‘lame.’
Being a family member is hard no matter where you are. It’s hard to be a kid. It’s hard to be a parent. It’s hard to be a brother or sister. It takes patience and kindness and forbearance.
It was hard to write about my dad for the first book because I know how sensitive he is. I knew he wasn’t going to take it as well as my mom, who can kind of roll with the punches and is used to having me tell her everything she has done wrong as a parent.
There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
Dr. Evil got shortchanged in the first one. The family dynamic between Scott and Dr. Evil – the adventures of being an evil single parent – needed to be explored.
I like kids but I also like the option to close the door. Becoming a parent is a whole other life, and it doesn’t stop.
Where you are born, your parent’s beliefs, or your ethnic background should not make you a target.
As any new parent knows, you’re only too happy to show off your new child and, you know, proclaim that he is the best looking or the best everything.
I was a single parent, and I was prohibited from working.
I was illustrating, and I was cleaning people’s houses; I was doing whatever I could to take care of my kid as a single parent.
As a parent, I can get so frustrated. Any parent can!
Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate.
Being on a major label is like living at your friend’s parent’s mansion: It’s a lot nicer than any apartment we could afford, and the fridge is always full of food.
As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can’t protect my kids from that.
The thing that every parent hopes for is that the baby’s healthy, I’m healthy. No matter how you feel, that’s the most important thing.
A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don’t offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers.
I think that in order to parent effectively, we are going to have to admit two things: We can’t keep our children safe. We can’t accept the fact that we can’t keep our children safe.
Every parent has gone through a period when their child wasn’t so happy with them.
The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on our souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent’s sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world. God bless Neil Armstrong.
Success isn’t ideal for every child. If we think a child would do better in a different school, whether it’s a specialized program or just a school with a different approach, we’ll tell a parent that, as we should.
Every parent, no matter how cultured or sophisticated, will one day succumb to a child’s pleas to visit Walt Disney World Resort.
The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea – wink, wink.
I was not prepared to live as a single parent.
If it gets to the point where I actually physically cannot have a child, there’s plenty of children in the world that need a stable home and loving parent. I’m so down for adoption.
In the years when HIV was a killer, any parent of an openly gay person was terrified. I knew my mother well enough that she would spend every day praying that I didn’t come across that virus. She’d have worried like that.
I’ve become sort of an accidental advocate for attachment parenting, which is a style of parenting that… basically, the way mammals parent and the way people have parented for pretty much all of human history except the last 200 years or so.
As a parent, you experience the most of everything. The most love, the most fear, the most hurt and the most tired, the most of every emotion.
I think any parent that makes their kid sit at a piano against their will and practice, they’re going to have a kid that’s not going to want to play the piano.
A very painful part of being a parent is having really negative feelings about your children when you love them so much.
If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.
I want to be a better parent than I had. Even though my mom was absolutely amazing. Her and I are still best friends to this day. I think that the next generation should always be better and better.
Things parents say to children are oftentimes not heard, but in some cases you pick up on things that your parent would like to see you have done.
Well, I think one of the big things wrong with kids these days, a lot of them don’t have a family. A lot of them got one parent and there’s quite a few that don’t have any parents and that’s where the whole problem is. There’s no family life, no father to slap ’em around when they need it.
As a parent, I know how difficult it can be to encourage your kids to eat well.
Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.
Acting is something I’ve done since I was in high school, but I never had a model in my life, whether it was a mentor or a parent, where I could realize that acting could actually be a career.
While having a profound impact on the development of values is surely an important job of a good parent, force-feeding opinions to them is not.
When I heard ‘Rockabye,’ I was just blown away. It had been a long time since I had heard a song that had a message like that in it – about being a single parent and caring for your child.
In our country, being from immigrant parents, growing up black in the South, coming out at 16 years old, being a teen parent… you would assume that my life would amount to nothing. And here I stand today. So, if I can do it… you can, too!
Time is the king of all men, he is their parent and their grave, and gives them what he will and not what they crave.
When you’re a parent, your child’s health is your number one concern, and to get the news that your child has diseases or is unhealthy, I’m sure, is absolutely crushing.
I want my kids to have a life like I did growing up. The greatest gift I was given in life was from my parents. Though I can’t match them, I’d like to be that kind of parent.
It’s important that when kids are listening to my music they don’t think of it as their parent’s music.
It’s a weird thing to have your dad or your parent be on the stage with a million people saying their name, and you’re like, ‘No, that’s just dad.’
The culture looms much larger than you do as a parent, and one can hardly rely on the culture to impart the lesson that womanhood is valuable.
Well, I took a sabbatical. I walked away from shooting movies because I couldn’t handle the travel. I’m a single parent. I had young kids, and I found that keeping in touch with them from hotel rooms and airports wasn’t working for me. So I stopped.
Healthy love, I always think, is… wanting the person you love to be more of themselves. And I think for a parent that’s a challenge, because you have to let a baby spread its wings.
