Inspirational Parenting Quotes and Advice

One of the toughest, demanding, and arguably the most fulfilling job in a human life is bringing up children. Most people dive into parenting on the job without training. This post is an attempt to provide insights, advice, and guidance through quotes from some of the most articulate people on this planet.

Parenting defies categorization. However, I have tried it to bring out various perspectives of parenting. Do comment and let me if you found this useful.

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

― Benjamin Spock

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

― John Wilmot

Parents Love for Children Quotes

‘Unconditional love’ is commonly used to describe parenting. Read on for insights on this aspect.

What it’s like to be a parent: It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.

― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

― Bill Ayers

I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year

I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you’ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.

― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

Parents as Teachers Quotes

A crucial role of parenting is to teach children and prepare them for life.

There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.

― Albert Schweitzer

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

― James Baldwin

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.

― Anne Frank

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.

― Emilie Buchwald

Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they’re able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they’re treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids’ hearts are malleable, but once they gel it’s hard to get them back the way they were.

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

― Benjamin Franklin

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

― Albert Einstein

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

― George Bernard Shaw

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

― Margaret Mead

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.

― Khaled Hosseini

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.”

― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way – or always to have it.

― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent’s rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says ‘PRIVATE–GROWNUPS KEEP OUT’: a child sprawled on the bed, reading.”

― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”

― Bertrand Russell

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.”

― Plato

Quotes on Role of Parents in Children’s Life

What’s the role of parents? Read further for some excellent advice.

If your kid needs a role model and you ain’t it, you’re both f*cked.

― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

To be in your children’s memories tomorrow,

You have to be in their lives today.

― Barbara Johnson

It’s not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It’s our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.

― L.R. Knost, Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages

It’s impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.

― Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.

― Robert A. Heinlein

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

― Greg Mortenson

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway… let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.

― C. JoyBell C.

A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.

― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he’d be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] – to teach your child to live without you.

― Nicole Krauss

Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.

― Isabel Allende

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.

― Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else’s.

― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

Parenting Experience Quotes

Parenting is considered to be the most fulfilling part of a person’s life. Here are some thoughts from famous writers.

Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. Take time with them, teach them to have faith in God. Be a person in whom they can have faith. When you are old, nothing else you’ve done will have mattered as much.

― Lisa Wingate

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

― Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven

No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you’ve got, say “Oh, my gosh,” and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It’s not a question of choice.

― Marisa de los Santos, Love Walked In

If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

― Bette Davis

The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.

― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

The soul is healed by being with children.

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did – that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that – a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.

― Debra Ginsberg

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.

― P. J. O’Rourke

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don’t get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence–so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive.

― Laura Moriarty, The Rest of Her Life

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

― Angela Schwindt

I sometimes wake in the early morning & listen to the soft breathing of my child & I think to myself, this is one thing I will never regret & I carry that quiet with me all day long.

― Brian Andreas

Mother Quotes

Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.

― Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel

24/7 once you sign on to be a mother, that’s the only shift they offer.

― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

Mother is a verb. It’s something you do. Not just who you are.

― Cheryl Lacey Donovan, The Ministry of Motherhood

Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary

When your mother asks, “Do you want a piece of advice?” it’s a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.

― Erma Bombeck

The only love that I really believe in is a mother’s love for her children.

― Karl Lagerfeld

Father Quotes

My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.

― Jim Valvano

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

A man who is not a father to his children can never be a real man.

― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

Children Quotes

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

It’s the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.

― Frank Warren

There’s nothing more contagious than the laughter of young children; it doesn’t even have to matter what they’re laughing about.

― Criss Jami, Killosophy

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

― Alexandre Dumas

Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life when they could reach one another in calm.

― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

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.

― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

― Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Children see magic because they look for it.

― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

You cannot write for children. They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

― Maurice Sendak

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

― Norman Douglas

Funny and Humourous Quotes on Parenting

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

― Dorothy Parker

We spend the first 12 months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.

― Phyllis Diller

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I’m not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

― Bill Cosby

What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

― Rodney Dangerfield

All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

― Erma Bombeck

Parenthood…It’s about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.

― Peter Krause (Parenthood)

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

― George Burns

Poems about Parents & Children

Your children are not your children.

They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Kahlil Gibran, On Children

Without you there would be no me.

I am everything reflected in your eyes.

I am everything approved by your smile.

I am everything born of your guidance.

I am me only because of you.

― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes

The plants and flowers

I raised about my hut

I now surrender

To the will

Of the wind

― Ryokan

Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is the way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.

― William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

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