Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

Sometimes when you have children they're the opposites of you.

As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.

We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

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

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

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.

How can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives

when we are young our parents run our life; when we get older, our children do.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents' value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings

If parents would only realize how they bore their children.

My father is the reason I am the way I am today. He's why I acted up and he's why I prayed to be the opposite of him. We made up before he died but I vowed to never raise my kids like how he raised me.

Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.

Children, a lot of times, can't make their parents wrong because they have to live with them, because they have to love them. And when you're young, you can't get on your Big Wheel and go down to the Best Western. You've got to live there and you've got to figure it out.

I've only recently realized that I have a radically different relationship with my parents than a lot of people.

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.

I resemble the father I once hated.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

You either become like your parents or you become the opposite of your parents. And I like to think that I'm the opposite of my parents.

While I have always had a good relationship with my father, much of the time it has been a very limited relationship until I was older. So you can't really give him credit or blame for how I turned out.