Dave Barry Quotes

For toddlers I suggest leaving their mittens on year-round, indoors and out. That way they can't get into aspirin bottles, liquor cabinets, or boxes of kitchen matches.

Until I became a parent, I thought children just naturally knew how to catch a ball, that catching was an instinctive biological reflex that all children are born with, like knowing how to operate a remote control or getting high fevers in distant airports.

Today's toys contain computer chips, so they can move and talk; this stimulates the mind of your child. Notice I say "your child." MY child just wants to eat the toys.

I like children - fried.

As a father, safety is always a top of mind issue for me.

I can't just lie in bed and be self-obsessed if there are two children running about who could easily fall down the stairs.

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

Just because a baby cries, I discovered, doesn't mean there's always something wrong. Sometimes babies wake up for no real reason. They just want to check if they're doing it right. "This is Sleeping, right?" "Exactly." "I just lie here?" "That's right." "Okay." Then back to sleep they go.

You learn a lot though when you have kids, I'll tell you what. Did you know when a baby poops its diapers, you're not supposed to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper?

I wasn't really that informed about the two-year-old. Oh, I'd read about them, and occasionally I'd see documentaries on the Discovery Channel showing two-year-olds in the wild, where they belong.

Babies aren't dishwasher-safe.

Before Kady was born, I didn't think having a kid would be such a big deal. My attitude was simple: Babies are nice, play with them, put them in the closet until the next time.

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

One of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance. ... [Parents] dare not risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: this is how we have reproduced our genomes.

Give an average baby a fair chance, and if it doesn't do something it oughtn't to a doctor should be called in at once.

Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves.

Children are very overprotected now, in lots of ways. We're very nervous about them. You know, people go, "Don't go outside! Or inside! Get into the cupboard with some spinach!" When I was a child they'd kick you out and you weren't expected to come back until there were bats!

Let's save all the children, save the babies, save the babies.

Every parent can imagine the joys of child abuse.

There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.

I am not talking about the American people and the British people, I am talking about those mercenaries. ... They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children.

I live near a remedial school. There is a sign that says, slow... children. That can't be good for their self esteem. But look of course on the positive side, they can't read it.

My baby is weird man... when he get mad, he gets in the oven.

Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.