Sydney J. Harris Quotes

Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

Most parents don’t know really their children.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

It's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is.

If parents would only realize how they bore their children.

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

It was just this interesting, my first, the first time you hear your child in any way criticise you. It's the worst review of your life and it's really relieving to find out that they don't know what they're saying.

Since the beginning of time, every child on the planet has endeavored to please their parents.

I remember yelling at my mother one time, horribly. I was in tenth grade or something like that, and I hadn't done something, and she misunderstood because my stepfather told her something that was wrong that I hadn't done.

We all have opinions to what our parents really are, whether they agree or not. I'm sure they would feel the same the other way around.

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

One of the things about parents and children is that there is no way that you go through this without there being mutual anger.

From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.

Parents cannot expect advice to have the same force upon their children as experience has upon themselves.

Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.

We are the buffoons of our children.

Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency.

Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.

The child is thinking and receiving vibrational thought from you on the day that he enters your environment. That is the reason that beliefs are transmitted so easily from parent to child.

Vaisey said, "Is it because your parents don't understand you?" Charlie said, "No, it's because our parents understand us very well, and that is why they wanted us to go away.

A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?