Camryn Manheim Quotes

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

My sons are a hell of a lot easier to get through to than my daughter is. She seems to have my number. She can just run through the buttons.

Children, a lot of times, can't make their parents wrong because they have to live with them, because they have to love them. And when you're young, you can't get on your Big Wheel and go down to the Best Western. You've got to live there and you've got to figure it out.

It gets to you as a father when your kids don't react to you in the way you imagine.

As children, we develop some scorn for our parents and their imperfections.

When a child is small, it is his mother who is mainly responsible for the way he is brought up. So it was with me. I belonged in those days to my mother rather than my father.

We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Be a father first. Don't put a priority of being a friend with your wife first, or a friend with your kids first.

If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child's universe.

Parents don't need government to raise their kids. That's their job. But government can help them protect their children from influences they may not want their kids exposed to.

I've always been way closer to my mom. I'm close to my dad, but they're totally different kinds of relationships.

It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.

I don't agree with the whole 'my mother's my friend' approach, because you're their mum and there has to be a difference between the generations.

We need to stop the erosion of parental authority.

I have done everything I can to make sure my daughter knows her father because you form your own identity by rebelling against your parents - but first you have to know them.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

One father is enough to govern one hundred sons, but not a hundred sons one father.

A kid never listens to what his parents tell him to do. The parents actually act as an example of what their kids themselves do.

While not impossible, it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.

The fate of a child is in the hands of his parents.

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.