Joan Fontaine Quotes

Insults from an adolescent daughter are more painful, because they are seen as coming not from a child who lashes out impulsively,who has moments of intense anger and of negative feelings which are not integrated into that large body of responses, impressions and emotions we call 'our feelings for someone,' but instead they are coming from someone who is seen to know what she does.

My relationship with my mom is really bad.

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

You know the troubles I've had with my two older children. I can't understand why it turned out so badly. I tried to give them everything. I loved them and tried to keep them near me, even when they didn't return my love. Well, I couldn't make them love me, but they could have shown some respect. I couldn't insist on love, but I could insist on respect.

Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting. He had never molested me, but I wanted to have a party that weekend and needed him out of the house.

I hated my father all my life but in his final days I forgave him for all the suffering he caused us. As you grow older, marry, and have children of you own, you learn and forget. I do not forget easily, but I do forgive.

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

The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.

I have four daughters, with the two youngest being four years old and a year and a half. When one of my older daughters was in sixth grade, a classmate brought in their talking Winnie the Pooh doll for show and tell, so the next week my daughter one upped her classmates and brought me to school in for show and tell.

My mother won't admit it, but I've always been a disappointment to her. Deep down inside, she'll never forgive herself for giving birth to a daughter who refuses to launder aluminium foil and use it over again.

There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.

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.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.

Children consider disliking their parents natural, but if the dislike is returned, they are outraged.

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

I thought about all of us women and how we spend half our lives rebelling against our mothers and the next half rebelling against our daughters.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols-all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child's authentic self to a parent s needs.

There are great parents of small children - they keep their little hair in bows - but those parents are not always good parents of young adults. As soon as their children get up to some size, it's "Shut up, sit down, you talk too much, keep your distance, I'll send you to Europe!" My mom was a terrible parent of small children but a great parent of young adults. She'd talk to me as if I had some sense.

For in those tacit understandings which maintain the bond of family union, the mother is really the mistress of her daughter only upon the condition of continually presenting herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection.

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

You will not believe me, but I am proud of your strength. Sometimes. . . sometimes the only way I can care for my children is to keep my distance.