Parenting Impact Quotes

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

My mother was a terrible narcissist and I could well have turned out like her.

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

When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.

When you have kids, you don't really watch TV anymore, and when I do, I binge-watch box sets of 'Breaking Bad.'

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Becoming a mom made me more contentious about expressing my true taste.

Since I've had children I don't really like horror movies.

Yeah, anytime anybody has a kid, you know how you feel when you have a kid, you look at the world differently because your kid's in the world now. When it's just you, whatever happens happens but now you pay more attention to political things. You pay more attention to things because your daughter or your son has to deal with these circumstances.

The greatest responsibility is your children. If my children turned out badly, I'd feel that nothing I had done was worthwhile.

Certainly, words can be as abusive as any blow. . . . When a three-year-old yells, "You're so stupid! What a dummy!" it doesn't carry the same weight as when a mother yells those words to a child. . . . Even if you don't physically abuse young children, you can still drive them nuts with your words.

Since I had the baby I can't tolerate anything violent or sad, I saw the Matrix and I had my eyes closed through a lot of it, though I didn't need to. I would peek, and then think, oh OK, I can see that.

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

I've got a vibe going on with a lot of what I've been doing, and to completely change it based off of me having a child might be a little confusing. I'm sure as my life goes forward, and she starts growing up, there will be a lot more things to include in my music. But, at this point, I'm just sticking to what I do.

I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length.

If anybody comes up to you and says, My kid is a conservative - why is that? you say, Remember in the 60′s when we told you if you kept using drugs your kids would be mutants?

Before kids, I was really going to the limit. Afterwards, I was approaching the limit but then maybe turning around.

I don't consciously think of how parenthood has changed me but I'm sure it must have.

It's been the greatest gift that I've been given. Because no matter how much my parents have asked me to be more patient, no matter much my husband has asked me to be more patient, none of it mattered until I had a kid. And then all of sudden I was like, "Oh. I have to be more patient." They were all like, "Yeah! We've been telling you that for twenty years!" And I find it to be a gift. Every day I'm more patient.

I think children of divorced parents do grow up quicker. You just do.

Children internalize their parents' unhappiness. Fortunately, they absorb our contentment just as readily.

In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.

Like anyone, I stress and get hard on myself from time to time, but it's minute compared to the pressure I used to put on myself to perform and succeed. To my kids' credit, they've probably helped me the most here: I'm more worried about what they're doing than what I'm doing!