Paul Reiser Quotes

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.

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.

The way I was parented did affect my parenting - probably in the reverse. My dad was pretty strict, and the next generation probably wants to be less strict.

It is true that all mothers do things differently from their own mothers, but they don't necessarily do them better.

I deliberately try to carry a different perception of myself as opposed to my father's. I respect my dad and his body of work, but I can't give him credit for what I am today. As a person, I give my parents full credit; career-wise, no.

When you're little you either want to be like your dad or be directly opposite.

The way I'm raising my kids is so different than the way I was raised.

It's funny 'cos I think a lot about kids who grow up with their parents being really important members of their fields, and they just go the opposite way.

I'm not my mother. And so I'm not raising my kids in the same way. I don't respond in the same way. We don't spend our days in the same way because I don't necessarily enjoy the same things she likes to do.

Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?

My mother was okay with me not playing it safe. She made an agreement with my father that I was going to be raised differently than my brother and sister were. My parents went through the whole sixties rebellion with my brother and sister. But I didn't feel like I had to rebel because I didn't have anyone telling me I couldn't do something. I never went into that parents-as-enemies stage.

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.

I called my mother immediately to inform her that she was a bad parent. "I can't believe you let us watch this. We ate dinner in front of this." "Everyone watched Twin Peaks," was her response. "So, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?" "Don't be silly," she laughed, "of course I would, honey. There'd be no one left on the planet. It would be a very lonely place.

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.

In the end, the type of parent you are is going to be something that you carry with you. ... Having multiple kids, it's been a gift in a way. It's keeping the priorities straighter.

I am not really trying to act like my dad.

My household runs the same way it was with my parents, who were a mother and father with their kids.

I think, a lot of times, people don't want to do what their parents do because they want to be their own person.

I think it's always natural for children to rebel against their parents and establish their own identity. And also, I think parents get invested in, you know, doing the right thing? And so their anxiety about being good parents might, in a way, affect a relationship negatively.

I watched a ton of TV because I was raised by a single mom and spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Like most grandparents do, she would spend hours and hours in front of the TV box.

I have always believed that the way my parents disciplined me has a great deal to do with the success I have enjoyed as a man.

My mum did encourage me, perhaps most of all by never discouraging me from anything I wanted to do. If you tell kids not to, they're going to do it in the end anyway. I'd finished all that staying-out-all-night-drinking bit when everybody else came to it. Probably why I don't like alcohol today. I had it all by the age of 10.

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.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

When the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.