Dave Barry Quotes

Taking a child to the toy store is the nearest thing to a death wish parents can have.

I'll never get sick of raising my children, but other people might get sick of them.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character.

Raising children is the hardest job that there is on the face of the Earth.

You don't know what it's like! Hyperactive twins! When they turned three, my doctor prescribed Ritalin -- I wouldn't dream of giving a drug to my children, but it does help when I take it myself.

One [expert] said, 'Always have a baby sitter who is acquainted with your children.' If they were acquainted with my children, they wouldn't sit!

Sometimes parents, when they have a lot of small children, it's hard because your time's got to get divvied up. There's no other way.

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don't have a cook now, I haven't had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone's homework at the end of the day and make dinner.

It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child.

The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own.

Good parents have children who do terrible things and vice-versa.

Some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted. Two or three stinging strokes on the legs or buttocks with a switch are usually sufficient to emphasize the point, 'You must obey me.'

Raising a child is like taking care of someone who's on way too many shrooms, while you yourself are on a moderate amount of shrooms. I am not confident in my decisions, but I know you should not be eating a mousepad.

Our children are weird. Nicely phrased.

The trouble with most problem-solving books for parents is that they start with the idea that the child has a problem. Then they try to tell us how to fix the child, or else, after blaming the parent, they suggest how we can fix ourselves.

Rich women are not too put upon by their children. You don't have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school.

It's easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child - at least till you try to get him to do something.

How many really capable men are children more than once during the day!

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.

My kids used to do things to aggravate me, too. I'd take them to a game, and they'd want to come home with a different player.

She wasn't that tough on me, but I think she was often a little frightened - being a single parent. So it begets this quality of desired absoluteness that doesn't really exist. My sister could crack her up. She'd be getting into trouble and put the Steve Martin arrow through her head and mom would start to laugh. I didn't have the same sort of wiliness.

I never went to the Beatles' concerts to scream. I never screamed at anybody's show. I was on my feet with the entire, all of the crowned heads of Motown, and we were shrieking our guts out.