Benjamin Spock Quotes

I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called "experts" have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won't take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, "I don't like this advice," the parent won't feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

Folks that has brought up children know that there's no hard and fast method in the world that'll suit every child. But them as never have think it's all as plain and easy as Rule of Three—just set your three terms down so fashion, and the sum'll work out correct.

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

Children don't have to be raised. They'll grow.

Those children who have been most chastised seldom make the best men.

People warned us that if we went to them whenever they cried and refused to spank them, we would harm them irrevocably, but we decided there's simply no way to spoil a child. After all, they aren't apples.

Parenting is no sport for perfectionists.

I think some men like to be hands-on dads. It's up to individuals. We did it the way that suited us.

There is a trend in child-rearing that I find abhorrent: "Whatever the kids want to do is fine." For me, the classic example of this is when someone has a visitor and says, "Go kiss Aunt Gertrude," and Aunt Gertrude says, "She doesn't have to kiss me if she doesn't want to." Well, I think that's wrong.

I'm not raising the children, I'm raising the grown ups that they're going to be.

Mr. Freeman: You are getting better at this, but it's not good enough. This looks like a tree,but it is an average, ordinary, everyday, boring tree. Breathe life into it. Make it bend - trees are flexible, so they don't snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch - perfect trees don't exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.

I finally realized that no one is perfect and that I like the fact that I look different and don't have the perfect body. No one does!

So often feminism is built up as this thing where you have to be perfect. You have to be consistent and you can't ever deviate. That's just not realistic.

If you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind of adult you wanted. There's almost this kind of competitive enterprise. That picture is the picture I think people often imply when they use the word "parenting".

A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.

Do not try to produce an ideal child, it would find no fitness in this world.

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.

We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.

No other work transcends that of righteous, intentional parenting.

Some people can seem perfect... everything about them can, on paper, be just right. Until you get to know them. Really know them. Then you find out, in the end, while they might be perfect to every one else, they just aren't right for you.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

People are human. There's such a premium today on being perfect. That's just not the way people are.

To be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

You’re training a new employee,' says Mrs. Clark, 'to take over your boring old job.' When you raise a child.

Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.