David Blankenhorn Quotes

I love to hug my children. I love to tell them I love them every day before they leave for school or before I leave for work. And I think that's the most important thing you can do as a father is to make sure that your children know they're loved.

Witnessing the bond between a parent and their little ones firsthand really brought home to me how much I was missing.

I don't live my life through my kids, nor do I expect them to live theirs through mine. But of course, they're everything.

Children need to have a home. I don't mean a physical four walls and a room. There needs to be an emotional and spiritual and loving place in life. That's what a family is.

If I cannot give my children a perfect mother I can at least give them more of the one they've got--and make that one more loving. I will be available. I will take time to listen, time to play, time to be home when they arrive from school, time to counsel and encouerage.

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

The three things you can offer your children to change them: attention, appreciation and affection.

What makes Will the best father in the world to me is that he's there, not just there in a way that's traditional. The emotional support he offers his children is immeasurable.

The time and the quality of the time that their parents devote to them indicate to children the degree to which they are valued by their parents. . . . When children know that they are valued, when they truly feel valued in the deepest parts of themselves, then they feel valuable. This knowledge is worth more than any gold.

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

What better can parents and children give to each other than respectful, understanding attention.

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

You rock a sobbing child without wondering if today's world is passing you by, because you know you hold tomorrow tightly in your arms.

When children feel understood, their loneliness and hurt diminish. When children are understood, their love for their parent is deepened. A parent's sympathy serves as emotional first aid for bruised feelings. When we genuinely acknowledge a child's plight and voice her disappointment, she often gathers the strength to face reality.

The greatest gift a parent can give a child is unconditional love. As a child wanders and strays, finding his bearings, he needs a sense of absolute love from a parent. There's nothing wrong with tough love, as long as the love is unconditional.

I feel things more deeply... anything to do with kids. It just makes a big difference in my life... Having a child is like taking the deepest core vulnerable aspect of myself, reaching in and taking it outside of my body.

When a mother takes pictures of her children on the beach, she doesn't take herself for an artist; she does it for love, which is an excellent reason, from my point of view.

When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they're important - that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them.

We kiss and hug our kids a lot! And even now when our son lives 3,000 miles away, we talk every day, sometimes several times.

A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.

All my children are my babies. They're our babies.

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.

Above all else, children need to know and feel they are loved, wanted, and appreciated. They need to be assured of that often. Obviously, this is a role parents should fill, and most often the mother can do it best.

The thing you can do better than anyone else is love your children, because they're your children.

Anyone who ever wondered how much they could love a child who did not spring from their own loins, know this: it is the same. The feeling of love is so profound, it's incredible and surprising.