Dave Barry Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The best time to give advice to your children is while they're still young enough to believe you know what you're talking about.

I have 'Parents' magazine in my home.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

Parenting is the most important job on the planet next to keeping Gary Busey off the nation's highways.

Before I married, I had three theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.

An incredible number of people have raised children who aren't too screwed up. Surely, I won't be the worst at it.

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

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

I think when you have children, it just changes your worldview.

Suddenly we have a baby who poops and cries, and we are trying to calm, clean up, and pin things together all at once. Then as fast as we learn to cope--so soon--it is hard to recall why diapers ever seemed so important. The frontiers change, and now perhaps we have a teenager we can't reach.

My children are now adults and just kind of guide them while they allow you to have input in their lives without controlling them the way you did when they were toddlers. These are good steps to use for fathers at each step of their children's lives.

(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.

Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

Was parenting ever going to get easier? Did you ever reach a point where you could stop worrying?

Good parents have children who do terrible things and vice-versa.

Raising a child is like taking care of someone who's on way too many shrooms, while you yourself are on a moderate amount of shrooms. I am not confident in my decisions, but I know you should not be eating a mousepad.

They [Mark and Jay Duplass] both have young kids and talk about parenting all the time. So they get it. So they knew that it was a very delicate time and they knew that it was a lot. All it did was make me want to protect them from - and protect production from - any kind of burden.

Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.

There are so many common occurrences in raising children that people just can't seem to figure out.

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