James Hillman Quotes

Many, many people - many parents feel that their decisions are, maybe not, great decisions. Every parent has that, you know, parent guilt of my goal is to produce wonderful, productive individuals and put them out into society.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

It's important to see your parents as individuals. As a son or as a daughter you don't stop and think that your parents might have their own expectations, dreams or disappointments.

Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children.

[My mother] pretty much used to go along with my dad in that she wanted me to get an education so that if this incredible dream I had didn't work out, I would have something to fall back on.

My goal as a parent is to prepare you for the future, not to make you like me.

I didn't get interested in education until I had kids.

I think our first heroes with whom we discover flaws are our parents.

Kids grasp what you teach them, from crawling to walking, for everything they look up to their parents.

We all have opinions to what our parents really are, whether they agree or not. I'm sure they would feel the same the other way around.

Anyone who has a parent can relate to this idea of not quite understanding who your parents are or making up stories about them.

When a child is small, it is his mother who is mainly responsible for the way he is brought up. So it was with me. I belonged in those days to my mother rather than my father.

I think it's always natural for children to rebel against their parents and establish their own identity. And also, I think parents get invested in, you know, doing the right thing? And so their anxiety about being good parents might, in a way, affect a relationship negatively.

The thing you want your kids to do most of all is succeed in life and be everything they can be. And if there's anything that may infringe on that, that may limit that, I don't want my kids doing it.

Both my parents were a tremendous influence on me. My father's influence came from - he decided well, probably before we were born that as he put it, 'I'm not going to have any kids who are country club bums.'

A child should never even think about being a "good son." A parent decides that fate for the child. The parent encourages that. Not the child himself. And the "perfect dad"? I shudder at thinking what that may be.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

As parents, we should remember that our lives may be the book from the family library which the children most treasure. Are our examples worthy of emulation? Do we live in such a way that a son or a daughter may say, ‘I want to follow my dad,’ or ‘I want to be like my mother’? Unlike the book on the library shelf, the covers of which shield its contents, our lives cannot be closed. Parents, we truly are an open book in the library of learning of our homes.

As Anna Freud remarked, the toddler who wanders off into some other aisle, feels lost, and screams anxiously for his mother neversays "I got lost," but accusingly says "You lost me!" It is a rare mother who agrees that she lost him! she expects her child to stay with her; in her experience it is the child who has lost track of the mother, while in the child's experience it is the mother who has lost track of him. Each view is entirely correct from the perspective of the individual who holds it .

The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

I think how strict my mother's home could be with my mom and my stepfather, there was a fluidity and freedom in my dad's existence that I enjoyed when I was around him, though the responsibility was just different. He expected me to carry myself a certain way without all the rules and confines.

If you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind of adult you wanted. There's almost this kind of competitive enterprise. That picture is the picture I think people often imply when they use the word "parenting".