Charles Spurgeon Quotes

"What is the greatest mistake a parent can make?" she asked. "To believe that your children will be just like you."

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

I have a four year old and I'm telling you we did Nickelodeon last night and he embarrassed me. It was like one of those moments when I couldn't believe my kid is acting like this. I just had to just like walk away from him because he was really pushing my buttons.

I have 'Parents' magazine in my home.

I have made a lot of mistakes raising the four Jenner kids.

Bringing up children on my own was quite a busy time.

Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.

Children, when they are little, they make parents fools; when great, mad.

Raising children is like making biscuits: it is as easy to raise a big batch as one, while you have your hands in the dough.

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.

Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations.

Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.

I’ve noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse.

Was parenting ever going to get easier? Did you ever reach a point where you could stop worrying?

You learn a lot though when you have kids, I'll tell you what. Did you know when a baby poops its diapers, you're not supposed to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper?

In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age ..." You were never their age. You were older in the womb.

Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children's requests, even when unreasonable.

You'll never be a perfect parent, but you can be a praying parent.

Whenever I hear about a child needing something, I ask myself, 'Is it what he needs or what he wants?' It isn't always easy to distinguish between the two. A child has many real needs which can and should be satisfied. His wants are a bottomless pit. He wants, for example, to sleep with his parents. He needs to be in his own bed. At Christmas he wants every toy advertised on television. He needs only one or two.

Never teach your child to be cunning or you may be certain you will be one of the very first victims of his shrewdness.

There's no encyclopedia or book about parenthood. You learn on the fly.

~We were on a family trip to Death Valley, and there were moments when my husband and I wanted to just leave the kids there - all the whining! You think that no other kid can do it as much as yours. When they're with friends, they're great; when they're in the car with just the family, it's maddening at times. But you adore them anyway.~

Spare the rod and spoil the child - that is true. But, beside the rod, keep an apple to give him when he has done well.