Alice Dreger Quotes

When it comes down to it, I believe that, having made the decision to bring children into the world, I owe it to them to be as present as I can in their daily lives and to try my best to stay alive until they've made it through to adulthood.

If you bring a child into this world, whether it's planned or an accident, you'd better make sure you can care for it. You have to be around. You make time. It's as simple as that.

There's no vacation from being a parent.

Children are not a right, they are a privileged obligation.

Parenthood is not an object of appetite or even desire. It is an object of will. There is no appetite for parenthood; there is only a purpose or intention of parenthood.

As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility at least to stay alive.

When you become a parent, you really care that you get that right, and you care about nothing else.

I am a believer that if you bring children into this world, then you have a responsibility to do your best and support and guide them until the day you die.

I am a responsible parent and have always provided for my children. That fact cannot be disputed. I have made mistakes in my life, but failing to care for my children is not one of them.

Children... are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God's children.

There is no greater name for a leader than mother or father. There is no leadership more important than parenthood.

If my kids are doing well, then my life is going pretty well. And if my kids aren't doing well, it doesn't matter how the other elements of my life are. It's kind of amazing to have a context like that. This is really wonderful.

Being a parent is not a reasonable thing. It is a very hard thing. I am a parent and I know.

In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.

I think if you give your best as a parent, then that's all you can do.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.

I can easily tap into the feeling of being a mother and the feeling of, you always want what's best for your kids. And that's where most parents come from.

Fatherhood didn't just happen to me. I am deliberately living it, re-imagining it, and rediscovering it every day. It is as beautiful as I make it, just like anything else in life.

It triggers something in you as a human being because you forget what your parents did for you. But when you become a parent, you're like, 'Whoa! It's hard work.' No wonder your parents always tell you off! They've done a lot for you.

I personally don't resent having my children.

You earn the title 'parent.' I have done absolutely nothing to earn that title.

Because you give birth, because you impregnate someone, that does not automatically give you that title of mother or father. You earn the title.

Some parents want to be popular, but that's not their job.