John Irving Quotes

My son has been known to throw a book at the television set when he called for me to come play and I was obviously busy in the box. But I'm told that children of television performers grow up thinking that all mommies or daddies work on TV and that it's no big deal.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

I read somewhere that your voice towards your children becomes their inner monologue. That was so interesting to me, and I think that pertains to 'Better Things' as well.

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

If what you preach and what you do are inconsistent, your children will spot hypocrisy faster than anybody and do the opposite.

The deeds of the children are a testament to the upbringing they received from their parents.

Good mothers and good fathers and good families don't always have great children.

The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.

Whatever the parents are doing, the kids will follow suit.

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.

We are the buffoons of our children.

We fail our children if we say, 'Don't do as I do, but do as I say'.

Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

And Grandmother Hall really imagines that she can raise Eleanor and her two brothers differently than these children were raised. And if she is very strict and everything is very regimented and ordered and disciplined, that they will become the perfect children who her own children did not become.

A parent who has never apologized to his children is a monster. If he's always apologizing, his children are monsters.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.

The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.

Parents who indulge themselves 'in moderation' may have children who indulge themselves to excess.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives

The children of childish parents age quickly.

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

Every child is so helpless - just to survive he has to be political, he has to accept whatsoever the parents are saying.

Husbands, love your wives well! Your children are noticing how you treat her. You are teaching your sons how they should treat women, and you are teaching your daughters what they should expect from men.