Ruth Ozeki Quotes

I worry about my children worrying about me, feeling like they need to be the strong ones. It's not the right order of things.

My mum really depended on me. I'm the eldest of three girls, and she had emotional issues.

I related so much to the responsibility of being a parent, the responsibility of "did you screw your kid up," the responsibility of letting your own parents down.

You’re always a kid around your parents… Unless they’re acting like children. Then you don’t get the chance.

The parents' job is to be there for their kids, not the other way round. Troubles between parents need to be talked through with friends and not visited on the children.

Before, I guess, mum and dad were everything, but now, in my case, I had two new girls and all of a sudden they're completely dependent on you and there's a third generation. It's a funny shift all of a sudden. You have the babies, you have yourself and then you have your parents.

Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy.

I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.

My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn't want to accept this for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn't have. He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn't respect that. We tried to make him independent.

I have to keep reminding myself that I am their mother. Sometimes we are sitting at home and I feel like we are waiting for our mom to come home.

No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.

It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.

I think that parents only get so offended by television because they rely on it as a babysitter and the sole educator of their kids.

There are accidental parents, but there are no accidental children. There are illegitimate parents, but there are no illegitimate children.

It's not my business to raise anybody else's kids. Mom and Dad got to do all that.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

I see my parents a lot more often, but what I liked about the challenge of my part was I got to have those little kid feelings of being the daughter, and then switching and being a Mom.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

Kids don’t do what their parents say-they do what they see their parents do. So who was to blame here?

Right from the start my parents had left me to fend for myself. Apparently unaware that I was a kid, they invariably treated me like an adult, perhaps because they themselves were no spring chickens.

my parents ... had decided early on that all of the problems in my family had somehow to do with me. All roads led to Roseyville, a messy, chaotic town where, as parents, they were required to visit, but could never get out of quick enough or find a decent parking place.

When you feel protective toward your parents, you have become an adult.

I'm quite an example. I have four kids, all from the same wife, all from the same husband.

The worst thing your parents can do is try to emulate you.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.