If I had a personal wish for the new ideas in this new book it would be that every parent, every counselor, every teacher, every professor, every sports coach that deals with young people would understand the three circle concept.
As a parent, when I fail to listen to my kids, when our kids stop bringing us our problems, we have all failed as parents and as leaders.
While being a parent has been the most fulfilling experience of my life, it comes with a price. Besides the onslaught of worries and fears that can be paralyzing, more personally there is a struggle with identity, or the fear of loss or usurpsion of identity, if that makes sense.
I had four children, we all had to struggle to get up and get educated, and they all did their part, and we all did the best we could, and that’s what a family and a parent is supposed to do.
As a parent, your perspective of childhood is through the eyes of this person that you care so much about and you just want the world to be great for them. You want their life to be easy and happy.
Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed.
One becomes a grandfather and one sees the world a little differently. Certainly the world becomes a more vulnerable place when one has a grandchild, or now I have two. And I think that possibly there’s some tenderness that came out of just time and age and being a parent and grandparent.
Think of the universe as a benevolent parent. A child may want a tub of ice-cream and marshmallows, but a wise parent will give it fruits and vegetables instead. That is not what the child wants, but it is what the child needs.
None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots.
Talking with other parents really gave me some lessons that I try to hold on to now, as a parent of two boys.
I’m not sure what it means fully to be a parent.
Words have power. The things that you say to yourself as a parent – the things that you say maybe even just one time to your children – they take it, and they take it into their real world and into their life and beyond.
Young people can change and grow. Every parent knows that.
You want to be a good parent and you want to be a friend, and it’s hard to be both. You have to balance it as well as you can.
That thing, ‘You must stay together for the kids’, is out of fashion but is right. It’s not arguing parents that children don’t like, it is having one parent.
I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
It’s very, very, very, very difficult, you know any parent with children with any kind of special needs is very difficult.
I’m certainly not a perfect mother, but I’m trying to be what my mother wasn’t for me. My mother’s battled depression, so I understand it now as a parent, some of the things that she must have been going through.
I think every parent takes more pleasure in seeing their child succeed than seeing themselves succeed.
I have a husband who didn’t just resign himself to staying home but was happy to be the primary parent.
If you are a single parent, make friends with others in similar situations and develop friendships with married couples. Counsel with your priesthood leaders. Let them know of your needs and wants. Single parenthood is understood by the Lord.
The best thing I probably do is – I’ll say I’m a pretty darn good parent. I got good kids.
If watching your child die is a parent’s worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead… Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.
The Parent Trap wouldn’t have been as special without the remarkable performances by Hayley Mills.
From the time you are a tiny baby, a parent’s love is usually unconditional. Whatever you do, your parents think you are the tops, but when their memory goes, you stop recouping the love you’ve put in.
Whenever someone says to my mum: ‘How’s your son doing?’ she says: ‘Which one?’ If you’re a parent, you’re not going to go: ‘Oh I’ll concentrate on the famous one.’
For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that baby.
Becoming a parent has changed the risk calculus for me. But it might be age, too, and seeing a lot of friends die in the mountains. Will I take the same risks I took in my 20s? Probably not, but I will always push myself in the mountains.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.
I have big dreams. I want to keep songwriting. Direct films. Be a parent.
My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.
No matter what, it is very tricky and difficult just to be a good parent at all. I have a lot of help. And for that I’m very grateful.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to grips that the unexamined life is what works for most people. Most take what they learned in school, get a job, marry, buy a house, have a family, become a great parent, serve their god, community and country, hang with friends, and live a good life. And for them that’s great.
I am very blessed to have this experience of being a parent, but do not negate me from this industry because I am a parent.
I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
The focus around Circle China is really cross-border payments. If I’m a parent in China and my son is studying at London Business School, I might want to send 500 RMB. I should be able to do that and have my child instantly receive it as pounds sterling, in the same way people do that with instant messages today.
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents – you’re perpetually a child and they’re perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
No parent would fail to call the doctor if their child developed a fever.
Being a parent is amazing.
If a parent wants to talk about slavery or wants to talk about countries where bombs go off, they need to have a way – a setting – to have that conversation. And there are wonderful books out there for those kinds of conversations.
There’s a tendency, when the offspring of a famous person does something notable, to define them by their more-famous parent.
I think there comes a point in probably most father-son relationships where the son kind of starts becoming the parent.
When you’re a parent, you’re automatically the most uncool person that exists.
My mom, for all intents and purposes, was a single parent.
I think there is a moment in every parent’s life where we realize that we have lost ourselves a little bit. It’s a moment of looking in the mirror and going, ‘I need to put on some lipstick.’
When I was a kid, I worked as a clerk at my parent’s motel. From when I was eight or nine, I rented rooms, helped with laundry, folding tons of towels. And then I also worked at my dad’s gas station more as a young adult and as an adult.
No parent is there forever. So I won’t be here forever with these kids.
A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby’s large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
We need to make sure that the fast-growing States and the balance of States in this country have as much information as available because I cannot imagine the pain as a parent myself of having my child molested by someone in our schools.
I have been listening to people’s advice. Being a parent, you need all the advice you can get.
Parents still have a big influence on their kids – just ask any therapist. No, really, I think the parent is the most important influence on children: It’s how they learn to love and treat other people.
Universal coverage is a critical goal, but even if every man and woman, every parent and every child in America woke up with an insurance card in their hands, they would still need a place to go for health care.
I have a very steadfast tendency to parent myself, to monitor my development into the person I want to be. I’ve tried to keep the corruption minimal.
