I am very different as a parent to new kids. My work changed from being rooted in the sky to being rooted in the earth.
For America, Britain has never been more than a strategic player, and when it suits them to use us, then there’s been a rapprochement. But if it doesn’t suit them, you’re kicked out the door. In 1860, America was like a big, spoilt teenager trying to get away from its parent.
As a parent, it’s my responsibility to equip my child to do this – to grieve when grief is necessary and to realize that life is still profoundly beautiful and worth living despite the fact that we inevitably lose one another and that life ends, and we don’t know what happens after death.
If you have a line of business – I know this as a CEO – or if you have a teenager – I know this as a parent – who have a spending problem, what do you do? You quit giving them money.
I think my mother is my biggest influence. There are so many things I hate about her but at the same time I’m thankful for her. All I know is that when I’m a parent I want to be just like my mom. I can talk to my mom more than any of my friends could talk to their parents.
For some people, becoming a parent does change them, but it never changed me.
There is nothing better than being a parent. It is the most challenging job one could ever ask for. I love being a mom and I love being a friend to my children as well.
I can’t come on like a parent to these kids, if I do, I won’t be able to have fun working with them. The good news is they all have parents. The younger ones, their parents by law have to be on set.
Sometimes it’s a bizarre, fairly cold, and horrifying thing to be a parent.
When you’re in the middle of it, when you’re a kid growing up, you don’t think, ‘This is my first heartbreak.’ You just think, ‘My heart is broken.’ But then as a parent, you look back, and you see your child go through his or her first heartbreak, and you’re realizing, ‘Oh my God, this is her first heartbreak.’
I don’t think there’s anything more important than making peace before it’s too late. And it almost always falls to the child to try to move toward the parent.
When you’re a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.
If you’re not a parent, if you’re an aunt or uncle or neighbor, books are an amazing gift.
Most of us are raised to believe we are ordinary. The anchor of the universe is present in every child. A parent only needs to guide and step aside and let them fulfill their dharma. Help children remember that they can do or be anything.
For a dude, I think I do cook. I’m a stay-at-home parent a lot of the time.
Becoming a parent erased many of my negative childhood feelings and filled them in with something new.
My mom was a single parent.
You’ll be a good parent when you’re ready to no longer be selfish. Until I was about 35, it was all about me. I look back and I’m astonished at how I lived my life – it was totally self-involved.
As a free-speech advocate, I believe that adults should have access to any material they want. As a parent, and a community member, I think people should be able to protect their homes from imagery – much of it violent – that is, I feel, a form of child abuse when adult society inflicts it upon children.
You have to be enough of a parent – you have to be there. If I’m feeling bad, I really do just have to get on with it and try and channel it back into my work somehow, do something positive with it.
When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children – me, my five brothers, and three sisters – could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.
I have no regrets about not having children. I still wait for the pang of guilt, but I have none. I tune into the television show ‘Nanny 911’ occasionally which reminds me how much patience and love it take to be a good parent.
I completely appreciate the importance of fathers but millions of children are without loving homes. I think a child is lucky with one parent who truly loves her.
My son was born somewhat late in my life and I just found myself really feeling like I didn’t want to miss out on being a parent and being with him, and not wanting a situation where I was constantly pulled back and forth between being present, and having all these other pressures and considerations.
One of the things that I learned at a very young age is the power of a parent’s words to their children.
I really have always wanted to be a parent, and when I hit 36 and had just ended a relationship, I remember thinking how much I still wanted it. But I thought I’d adopt.
When you become a parent, you leave a lot of things behind and refocus, maybe on how simple life really is and what few things there really are to worry about. And everything else can go by the wayside.
I really believe that I’ve been a better parent from being a working mother.
My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.
As a mom to biological children and adopted gay children all around the world, nothing gives my heart strings a tug as much as seeing a parent stand by their queer/gay/trans child with beaming pride.
I’m just curious, who’s more fit to raise a child? A loving committed same-sex couple or an unmarried 15-year-old with no income and really no skills to parent?
What the Chinese parent is conveying to the child is not that ‘you’ve got to get A’s or else I won’t like you.’ On the contrary, it’s, ‘I believe in you so much, I know that you can be excellent.’
I believe whoever has the most energy wins. You need energy to win at your relationship, win in your career, win as a parent, win at being your highest potential self.
As a parent and a citizen, I’ll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs’s example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
One thing I always want to clear up was the notion that I ‘took time off to have a baby.’ A lot people leapt to that conclusion because becoming a parent happened to coincide with film roles tapering off.
Like anyone, you could love someone, and it doesn’t mean that you’re equipped or you were taught or have the patience or the love or the wherewithal to be a good parent. One has nothing to do with the other.
The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn’t do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl’s mother.
He was a huge football man – he loved football. He was a good parent, a great father, and brilliant with me.
Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt.
Every parent pursues the best possible opportunities for their child while climbing over obstacles and limitations each day. So in a way, all parents are entrepreneurs.
My kids are so much better parent than I was.
Learning how to be a good parent was easy in the end because I’d basically had the What Not To Do manual.
When any of us thinks of ourselves as a role model – whether that’s as a parent being observed by their kids or a leader under the microscope of their followers – it creates a natural stepping up of how we carry ourselves and what we expect from ourselves.
I’m not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges – which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it.
If you know the mother’s genome and the father’s genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.
The challenge as a parent is letting your kids fail in the right ways because that’s where we do most of our learning.
As a parent, a scientist, and educator, what I know is that it’s always better to provide the education that will help keep my children – all people – safe, even if I don’t want them to engage in the behavior.
I didn’t have time for my children much. I wasn’t a very good parent; I had a pretty unhappy home life.
Is it not evident that the Canadas, as well as the other colonies, have been left in a great measure to grope their way as they could through the darkness which surrounds them, almost totally unaided by the parent state?
I just didn’t know where I fit in – I didn’t seem to fit in my parent’s generation. I didn’t seem to fit in my own generation. Little by little, this took me into a spiritual search for understanding; a search for meaning and fulfillment.
Any child who has lost a parent probably knows every single photograph in existence of that parent.
Adopting means opening your home, and heart, to a life you’ve never known. But there is nothing as richly rewarding as being an adoptive parent.
