Family Patterns Quotes

I just wanted my daughter to grow up, get married, have children and get divorced like everyone else.

A light-heel'd mother makes a heavy-heel'd daughter.

Drugs will turn you into your parents.

The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

Characteristics cling to families.

My family still treats me like they did when I was 7 or 6.

One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.

I've begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward even after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children's and then our grandchildren's eyes.

If one sibling does something, the other will fill the opposite role. I found, at least for my brother and I in real life, that seems to be a thing.

We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children.

I love my parents very much, but people either continue or break the patterns of what their life should be and I just want to completely break whatever patterns would lead me to the same life choices that they made.

The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

I think that what's funny is that I seem to be taking up the roles that I remember my dad having - for some reason, I'm the one who makes the coffee, and my dad was always that guy. It's kind of shocking how closely I compare to my dad.

Maybe it's because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I'm frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don't need reassurance.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

One thing that I've noticed about big families is that they usually break down into two camps: the talkers and the watchers.

I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.

People tend to fear the ghosts in their own family. You feel these family curses and think, 'If it happened to my father, it could happen to me.'

I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.

I'm trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived.

See the cat? See the cradle?

I realise that I have made quite a few of the same mistakes with my kids that my dad made: not so much in trying to determine their lives for them but in terms of trying to discipline them.

I hate to be a broken record - my parents have a lot to do with that too, because that's how they live their lives.

I think when I came into marriage -- especially when you've had divorced parents like myself... You'd want to try even harder to make it work and you don't want to fall back into a pattern that you've seen happen in your own family. I desperately want it to work; I desperately love my husband and I wanted to share everything together. And I thought that we were a very good team.