David Lammy Quotes

There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe.

This bringing up of children is so blithely undertaken by many of us, and the vast majority have had no training. It is one of those professions that every woman thinks she can undertake, so nobody really prepares for it.

When you become a parent, you really care that you get that right, and you care about nothing else.

It took a long time for me to get into 'I'm taking care of kids,' and what that means.

I do think that there's an art form to parenting, and I have nothing but admiration for those who do it well.

No matter what, it is very tricky and difficult just to be a good parent at all. I have a lot of help. And for that I'm very grateful.

My father once said about being a parent that it is the only thing you do that requires a very long period of learning, and at about the time that you are becoming competent, you don't need the skills anymore. Notwithstanding this modest assessment of their parenting skills, they were wonderful parents.

It's the best thing in the world, the most challenging thing in the world, being a parent, and one of the first lessons I learned was to ask for help.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

I think it's harder - much harder - to be a good parent than to write a book.

My youngest is 26, and so I hardly remember life not being a father, but my wife and I were hands on-parents.

To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.

When it comes down to it, I believe that, having made the decision to bring children into the world, I owe it to them to be as present as I can in their daily lives and to try my best to stay alive until they've made it through to adulthood.

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters.

I'm not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges - which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it.

If you're the parent, be a parent. You know what I mean? I'm a parent. I have daughters.

There is no greater name for a leader than mother or father. There is no leadership more important than parenthood.

It is always fragile, being a parent.

As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.

I know how sobering and exhausting parenthood is. But the reality is that our children's future depends on us as parents. Because we know that the first years truly last forever.

Parents are the designated caregivers and are best suited for being able to raise children.

Having children makes you see the world in a completely different way. When you're responsible for those little lives, you can't slough it off or forget about it until later.

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.

Parenthood is a very, very intense experience.