Angelina Jolie Quotes

You know, I think that we are going to be OK. Look, Malia is 10, so three years from now she is 13. Who knows what happens to teenagers?

Kids who go to normal school are so teenagery, so angsty.

My daughter is, of course, perfect. Everyone's child is, but mine really is perfect. But I could not have raised her without my parents. From the time she was seven months until now, I have been a single parent.

For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully.

In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

I'm more selective now I've got a family. I don't want to work all the time. My daughter's 12; I don't want to miss out on her life. Soon she'll be a teenager; she won't want me around.

I think it's more and more important to spend time with your children, because it seems to be harder and harder for them to succeed as their parents have succeeded.

While not impossible, it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.

Everybody thinks they have the answer to how to be a good parent. Here's mine: Everybody's gonna make mistakes.

Speaking as a father, there is no rulebook, and you don't know how to do it. You just do the best you can.

Parents really just need support and not to be blamed and not to have fingers pointed at them.

Growing up, my dad and my mom were there for my sister and I.

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.

On her daughter: And she's going through all these changes. You know, it's just crazy times.

I was approaching adolescence. For some reason, I guess my mother thought it would be less crazy out in the suburbs, which it wasn't. I just think adolescence is hard for anyone.

There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

One thing that happens often times in family life is that people think maybe the challenge you are having with a child when they are a teenager or even in adolescence that this is going to go on forever and it doesn't. They get to their 20s, they change dramatically in their 20s. So sometimes it's just holding on for the ride, and just being there and holding on for the ride.

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

Imagine what it must be like for teenagers who don't feel they have room to breathe in their own homes. If you are a parent reading this book, you care about your child. If she is quirky, unusual, or nonconformist, ask yourself whether you are doing everything you can to nurture her unusual interests, style, or skills, or whether instead you are directly or subtly pushing her to hide them.

Relationships change even more than people. It's like two people changing. It's exponentially more volatile. Especially two teenagers.

Teenagers are people too!

Aunt May's values and Spiderman's traumas are kind of what's defined him as a young boy and now that he's becoming a young man, she's there to provide that safe place where he can still be a kid if he needs to be, or know that he has a home base as he's going through all these physical changes. So as long as those essentials are there, we can work on finding the character together.

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls