Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

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.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

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

Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.

I hope everyone can examine what is the most important relationship in life - the relationship between parent and child.

Do not make decisions for your kid. It's not going to turn out well.

To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.

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.

There is one thing you and I as parents cannot do, not do we want to do if we really think about it, and that's control our children's will--that spirit that lets them be themselves apart from you and me. They are not ours to possess, control, manipulate, or even to make mind.

. . . if we have children. When they are just born we do everything for them. We are omnipotent, they are completely dependent on us, but then when they grow up you must take back your influence on them, to give them freedom.

A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.

I'm going to stop punishing my children by saying, “Never mind! I'll do it myself.

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it.

In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.

I wondered if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent's secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was supposed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available. Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my own was the right order of things.

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

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

There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child's universe.

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God - I thank God every time I think of it - I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

I did say that I wanted to be a young mom, just because my mom was a young mom. It is better because I can be closer to my kids and stuff.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.

The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

I think with motherhood and child-rearing in general, everyone's going to tell you how to do it and why. I've always said to other mothers and women when they've asked me, that you have to find your own way and find out what works for your family, at all costs.