Mayim Bialik Quotes

I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.

You can instill fear in your kids and get them to mind, but they won't function better in the world and your relationship will suffer greatly.

Re raising kids: Love, without discipline, isn't.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn't really about disapproval; it's about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent.

Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

I wasn't rebellious. Other friends had far stricter parents and where there wasn't a relationship of respect and communication, they were usually the opposite; kids go to the other extreme.

I think there's different parenting styles.

If you have kids and stuff what kind of dad do I wanna be for my kids, and what kind of mom do I want them to have

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

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.

Do you light up when your kids are coming in the room or do you become the instant critic?

The line between being a nurturing parent and an over-bearing, damaging parent is one that's very delicate.

I think the biggest problem is parents are so concerned with being friends with their kids. You're not their friend. You're their parent.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.

I invite everyone to question their thoughts about their children and allow their children to be free. That's when we stop teaching our children fear.

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

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.

A parent who has never apologized to his children is a monster. If he's always apologizing, his children are monsters.

The moment when you are most repelled by a child's behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.

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

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children.