Fran Lebowitz Quotes

You're doing your kids a disservice if they do get everything they want because that's not the way life's going to go, and I think kids have to have some reality.

I wanted to be grown up the minute I could.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.

Children need parameters, know what's right or wrong.

When people are grownups they're grown ups. They make their own decisions you know.

We're allowed as adults to create a life that we like. Kids don't have that freedom.

I've had to be a man since I was 12 or 13. I had a job. And I was playing the piano for people twice my age. Handling responsibility is what makes a man a man.

All the things that most kids hated, I loved. I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o'clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.

People don't necessarily identify me with doing adult things.

I don't feel like I'm grown up. I feel like I'm a kid.

Most parents' goal is to launch their children into the world with all the tools they need to make it on their own.

I need to raise my kids. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to raise kids and make men of them these days. I don't want them to be lazy and just spend their father's money.

The child's conquests of independence are the basic steps in what is called his 'natural development'.

Because my parents had given me tremendous respect, trust, and freedom as a child, I knew how to take responsibility for myself. If you're constantly being told "No, don't do that" or "We don't trust you," you can't develop that responsibility.

What the majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis, it is not what you do for you children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.

I was freakishly ambitious. I didn't want to be a child. I wanted my own flat, to work and be a grown up.

Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.

The children of this world and the adults of this world are in entirely separate boats and only drift near each other when we need a ride from someone or when someone needs us to wash our hands.

It is not size or age that separates children from adults. It is responsibility.

Part of the thrill of guiding children into adulthood is the release. But it's also a parent's greatest act of surrender. Still, you have to let them go. Start now.

Children make that big a difference to you? He asked. I nodded. Yeah, they do. I never figured you as the maternal type. I'm not, but kids are people, Edward, little people trapped by the choices the adults around them make.

Has it ever occurred to you that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

The greatest thing about being a mother so young, I had my first child at 24, is that I cook, I clean, I love to be independent and kind of hate to be waited on and hate to be taken care of. So, I guess that demonstrates my fiercely independent nature which is kind of anti what I portray on a weekly basis.