Benjamin Spock Quotes

I think is important to give a child room to make mistakes in order to learn. Mistakes build wings so later in life they can fly and go on their own. Let them fall once in awhile... Be their friend and parent as well. When they're in trouble, they will come to you first. Don't try to change their opinion.

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

Be careful about the advice you give, especially to your children.

Like children, adolescents need a framework. Otherwise they can't cope. When someone has unlimited freedom, it means there's nobody who cares what they're doing.

This whole head of the home thing has been blown way out of proportion. Some guys just take it way too far. Some parents take it way too far. Yet children need guidance. They need a parent to help and guide them. They also need a friend. They need a confidant.

A father is a person who's around, participating in a child's life. He's a teacher who helps to guide and shape and mold that young person, someone for that young person to talk to, to share with, their ups and their downs, their fears and their concerns.

Children have more need of models than of critics.

When you undermine faith in a system, your child may not necessarily see the difference between the politician who is no longer respected and the policeman, the teacher, the parent.

I'm stopped by mothers who say, 'Mr. Wilder, what advice would you give to my young boy? He's really talented.'

I can't assume that my kid is going to make the best decision all the time.

I can see why people keep having babies. We were looking at a school for my youngest this morning, and there were all these little boys and girls. So sweet. And then the teenagers walk past, and, my God, they're enormous, and I bet they don't kiss their mummies. I'm just going to force my children to remain lovely.

All children will do things that you may not want them to. That's part of parenting.

The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

It is one of the paradoxes of parenting, and often a painful paradox, that even as our children need us for love and trust, they also need us for honest differing. It's not only over limits and rules...[but also] about what we represent in the way of culture, traditions, and values. We owe it to our children to let them know what we believe, and if they differ with us, we owe it to them to be honest adversaries, for it is through this honest confrontation that children can grow into adults who have a firm sense of their place in the sequence of the generations.

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child.He needs guidance.If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.

When children are loved, they live off trust; their bides and hearts open up to those who respect and love them, who understand and listen to them.

Youth need guidance, direction, and proper restraint...Parents, too, have a responsibility in this training not to provoke children to wrath. They should be considerate not to irritate by vexatious commands or place unreasonable blame. Whenever possible they should give encouragement rather than remonstrance or reproof.

A child is an eager observer and is particularly attracted by the actions of the adults and wants to imitate them. In this regard an adult can have a kind of mission. He can be an inspiration for the child's actions, a kind of open book wherein a child can learn how to direct his own movements. But an adult, if he is to afford proper guidance, must always be calm and act slowly so that the child who is watching him can clearly see his actions in all their particulars.

When your child is very young, you must protect him from doing harm to himself and others, then later by precept, explaining to him what is going to be for his eventual happiness.

My children are now adults and just kind of guide them while they allow you to have input in their lives without controlling them the way you did when they were toddlers. These are good steps to use for fathers at each step of their children's lives.

While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.

Every good teacher and every good parent has somehow learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.

If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.