Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Children must be rendered reasonable, but not reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey, and unreasonable for them to dispute.

Those children who have been most chastised seldom make the best men.

If I say to my daughter, "Go say 'hi' to Aunt Gertrude," there is a reason there. I'm teaching her manners. I think the idea that she'll say 'hi' to Aunt Gertrude only if she wants to is the biggest crock of silliness I've ever heard. Yet I meet people everyday who were clearly brought up to think that if they didn't want to say "hi" to Aunt Gertrude, that was fine.

In spite of what youngsters think, parents do not get a sneaky thrill out of punishing their children.

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.

By learning to yield to the loving authority of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life — his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers.

Parents, do you wish to see your children happy? Take care, then, that you train them to obey when they are spoken to, -to do as they are bid.... Teach them to obey while young, or else they will be fretting against God all their lives long, and wear themselves out with the vain idea of being independent of His control.

A wretched parent who claims obedience from his children, without first doing his duty by them, excites nothing but contempt.

It's very important that we instill some respect for the parents. In America especially, the kids are unruly, screaming at Mommy and Daddy, running the show.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

Many people think that discipline is the essence of parenting. But that isn't parenting. Parenting is not telling your child what to do when he or she misbehaves. Parenting is providing the conditions in which a child can realize his or her full human potential.

You have to discipline your children, or they won't respect you, law enforcement or God or anyone else.

The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching.

While they are kids, my children must do as I say.

As much as you don't like disciplining your kids, you have to sometimes. Kids want that structure, that leadership, that guidance. I think that's what I try to give my children.

I'm not a goody-two-shoes. I'm just a father with four children.

Parents should have perfect control over their own spirits, and with mildness and yet firmness bend the will of the child until it shall expect nothing else but to yield to their wishes.

They spare the rod, and spoyle the child.

That was a judicious mother who said, "I obey my children for the first year of their lives, but ever after I expect them to obey me.

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.

Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.

My mom always used to say, "You'll be a better kid if you just listen."

There is but one way to eliminate juvenile delinquency - that is by providing each child in America with competent parents.

Be ever gentle with the children God has given you; watch over them constantly; reprove them earnestly, but not in anger. In the forcible language of Scripture, "Be not bitter against them." "Yes, they are good boys," I once heard a kind father say. "I talk to them very much, but do not like to beat my, children--the world will beat them." It was a beautiful thought not elegantly expressed.