Bill Cosby Quotes

Parents cannot expect advice to have the same force upon their children as experience has upon themselves.

We are the buffoons of our children.

I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.

"What is the greatest mistake a parent can make?" she asked. "To believe that your children will be just like you."

I have a daughter, she's twenty years old.

I have a daughter, Catherine, aged 30. I have a 9-year-old son, Nathaniel, a 7-year-old son, Ridley, and a 6-year-old daughter, Truma. I'm 68. The age gap between the younger kids and me is not something I think about much because I feel physically about like I did when I was 40, or at least, I think I do.

I have 'Parents' magazine in my home.

I have four grown children and two tiny grandchildren.

I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that's kind of a natural progression. But I'm definitely drawn to it. It's probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.

As a father, you immediately become uncool, especially the older they get. The older you get, it's inevitable that, as cool as you think you are, you're probably just as lame in your kids' eyes.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

My daughter, Anna, is almost 15, and my son, Ben, is almost 10.

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.

Children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

Children, when they are little, they make parents fools; when great, mad.

Raising children is like making biscuits: it is as easy to raise a big batch as one, while you have your hands in the dough.

I was able to draw a lot from my own childhood, my friends' childhoods as well and my daughters' friends who are like my children as well. They multiply all the time. So you can have everything and say I can get all this done and then late at night one of your kids have a freak out about school or an assignment you end up staying up til 3 in morning helping them through it. Or somebody gets sick or has a crisis.

The young need old men. They need men who are not ashamed of age, not pathetic imitations of themselves. ... Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.