Martin Seligman Quotes

It's difficult to keep that perspective, I think, as a parent: to know your boundaries as to what's good parenting or just projecting your own expectations on your kids. That's the hardest.

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.

You have to support your children to have a healthy relationship.

People are always saying that Hollywood messes up kids. I'm like, 'No, families mess up kids!' I grew up in Hollywood, and I'm perfectly fine. If my children want to go into the entertainment business, I won't stop them, as long as they're passionate about it.

I'm not a goody-two-shoes. I'm just a father with four children.

One of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is to help them find their talents.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child.He needs guidance.If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

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

Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.

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

A lot of things I try to instill in my children comes off of what I've learned from my parents. First of all, you have to lead by example. You can't say one thing and behave another way. Kids learn more from watching you in life than what you say to them. So I try to be the best example I can be to them.

I invite everyone to question their thoughts about their children and allow their children to be free. That's when we stop teaching our children fear.

It's essentially encouraging parents, teachers, and caretakers to remind children how special they are on a regular basis.

Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.

There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that's control our children's will--that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.

To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control is to betray the idea of freedom.

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.

The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.

. . . if we have children. When they are just born we do everything for them. We are omnipotent, they are completely dependent on us, but then when they grow up you must take back your influence on them, to give them freedom.

So parents, get your children's permission to watch!

Like most parents in the US, they are trying, with a little help from UNICEF, to do the best they can to help their children reach their full potential.