Quotes about Parenting

The best thing you can do for your kids is to show them God working in you on a daily basis.

In fact, if our kids are successful in every normal way, they can still miss God's main mark.

Teach your kids by modeling what you claim to believe.

See, people are watching you. Especially your children. They're taking in every single thing you do. They are like video cameras with legs. And they are always in the record mode. They learn more from what you do than from what you say.

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.

A parents love is whole, no matter how many times divided.

I used to worry about falling asleep during prayer. Now, as a parent, I understand. What parent wouldn't want her child to fall asleep in her arms?

Some fathers exasperate their children by being overly strict and controlling. They need to remember that rearing children is like holding a wet bar of soap — too firm a grasp and it shoots from your hand, too loose a grip and it slides away. A gentle but firm hold keeps you in control.

Few things exasperate a child more than inconsistency. Pity the horse that has a rider who gives it mixed signals, digging his heels into its side and pulling the reins at the same time. Even more, pity the child who has the rules changed by a capricious father, and who is always exasperated because of the conflicting messages he receives.

Raise children who are grateful in general, and grateful to be an American in particular, or grateful to be the citizen of any decent country, who don't complain much, who learn to handle losing, and who are guided by values, not feelings. In other words, teach them how to be happy adults.

It is easier to perform surgery than to raise happy, healthy, good children — and surgeons are given years of specialized training, while most of us have to raise human beings from babyhood to adulthood with nothing but our own parents' often very faulty model to guide us.

If you build a society in which children honor their parents, your society will long survive. And the corollary is: a society in which children do not honor their parents is doomed to self-destruction. In our time, this connection between honoring parents and maintaining civilization is not widely recognized.