Pope Francis Quotes

We all have our family issues from time to time.

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

I can say, particularly as a mother of four small children. I can talk about the coarsening of our culture.

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else - or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon - find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.

We're in an era where they've sanitized home life in movies to such a degree that there is a certain home life that might be true if you have two perfect parents, and a nanny, and a couple babysitters, and support, and lots of money, and there's no strain at home, or whatever. But for most people, there's strain, you know? There's a lot of pressure, things can't be perfect, parents can't be perfect all the time. There's a divorce, there's money issues, whatever. People work, so you don't always have these vast reserves of patience every time your kid goes crazy.

If you're a single mother with two children, which is the toughest job in America as far as I'm concerned, and you're working hard to put food on your family.

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.

Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too--unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child's trouble.

Kids ... Can't live with 'em ... Can't shoot 'em!

The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

A two-career couple with children is a complex, sensitive piece of machinery with lots of moving parts. Anything less than total cooperation will throw it out of whack and shut it down. A couple can wind up paying the ultimate price for trying to have it all - losing it all.

It's easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child - at least till you try to get him to do something.

A grown child is a dangerous thing.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

While fathers are pleasant figureheads, there is a special bond between children and their mothers. 'Do you help your mother clean up the house?' I asked one girl of seven. 'No,' she sweetly replied, 'I help make the mess.' It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

My father said it himself in an interview many years ago: 'Husband and wife failed, but mother and father didn't.' I've got a life that really matters to me, and that's because of the way I was raised. My ethics are high because my parents did a great job.

My God, I could raise a family of six children and hold down a full-time job with all the energy I expend on depression!

My job makes me travel a lot and too often I'm away from my children, but I don't ever stop being a mom inside my head and my heart. There is no higher love than that.

The at-home mother's life: it was a race with no finish line.

One of the most visible effects of a child's presence in the household is to turn the worthy parents into complete idiots when, without him, they would perhaps have remained mere imbeciles.

Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, "Great. Maybe you can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.