Jami Gertz Quotes

I was wanting to be a kid at 18 instead of being a young woman.

Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.

It's fun to play mom. Last I knew I was playing a 17-year-old who graduated.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed. It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.

I'll never forget when I was 12 years old. I couldn't wait until the day I was 16 and could drive a car. I thought that'd be the end of life's problems. I mean, you can drive! What is there left? And then I turned 16 and realized there were still problems.

When you're younger, you're trying to understand and make sense of what your parents are trying to instill in you, which is ultimately life experience. I remember being 17 and my dad trying to teach me the importance of responsibility.

The teenage years are my least favorite, though my son is phenomenal. He does not get in trouble, and he's not a bad kid. But the fact that they think they know so much.

Parenting a pre-teen is quite something.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

Turning 16 is kind of scary because when you're 16, you go from being a kid and then you can drive and are more of a young adult in a way.

My daughter's the greatest thing that's happened to me in my life and she turned me into a more responsible man, as opposed to just someone who's a perpetual teenager, thinking you're a man when you're not.

Kids should be naughty and go through that rebellious phase I didn't have.

Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.

The sooner you treat your son as a man, the sooner he will be one.

Based on my own experience, when you're going through adolescence you don't know how the world works. You can't set a story in the world you live in because you don't know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck.

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

I love being a teen because you don't have all the responsibilities of an adult yet.

I think when you're 14 years old, I think you're sort of looking for markers that prove you're an adult and you're independent of your parents.

I am happy being able to play roles with people my age because once you do something really mature there is no turning back.

For my senior prom, my father finally said I could go - as long as I was home by 9 P.M.! That was around the time that most people were heading out. When I was little I was so mad at them all the time. 'Why can't I do this?' 'Why are there so many rules?' But looking back now, my parents gave me the foundation to have so many choices in life.

I'm currently raising a 15 year old son and an 18 year old daughter, which a guess is my punishment for a wild youth!

I have a 15-year-old daughter who thinks that I always had this self confidence that I have now at the age of 60. And I always tell her that what she is going through - the low self-esteem as a teenager - that is a right of passage.

17 is the weirdest age, because you can't figure out if you want to grow up or be a child.