Penelope Leach Quotes

I thought that once we were out of the baby stage, parenting would be a breeze.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

I think having children in general is always very helpful for acting.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

If you bungle raising your children, nothing else matters in life.

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.

It's harder for me, never having brought up a child, to enter the universe of the child.

In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

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

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

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

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

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

Don't be a pal to your son. Be his father. What child needs a 40-year-old for a friend?

Most parents don’t know really their children.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

If you do not give your children freedom, when they grow up, they will break away from the family, and then your hearts will be broken.

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

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

I do have to say my daughter, Sunday, said to me [I was being] overprotective, so you must have been a fly on the wall.

Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power.

They say that parenting is like dancing. You take one step, your child takes another.

When a child enters the world through you, it alters everything on a psychic, psychological and purely practical level.