Richard L. Evans Quotes

So frequently we mistakenly believe that our children need more things, when in reality their silent pleadings are simply for more of our time.

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

[Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months.

It is a pity that, commonly, more care is had--yea, and that among very wise men--to find out rather a cunning man for their horse than a cunning man for their children.

In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.

Good discipline requires time. When we have no time to give our children, or no time that we are willing to give, we don't even observe them closely enough to become aware of when their need for our disciplinary assistance is expressed subtley.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

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

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

I am the youngest of 14 children, so I rarely got a chance to speak. If I have an opportunity for talking, I talk

I’ve noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse.

To each his own. It's one of those things. How you build your family—you have to know what you're capable of handling and how your children will relate to each other. Maybe if you have one child and that child has a lot of needs, you realize you cannot give more attention to another. Sometimes you just know as a parent. We felt we could handle more children, and we have a very happy, very full home.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

I wonder if anyone can ever succeed in making their children content.

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.

They say that parenting is like dancing. You take one step, your child takes another.

Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.

I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis.

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

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don't choose the kind of child that we have.

One has very little influence upon one's children. Their characters are what they are and one can do nothing to change them.

Parents often brag about the amount of money spent per child, but I think, perhaps ironically, those great monies that are spent - I call it putting a band-aid on a hemorrhage.

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

My two kids take a lot of my focus, which I'm grateful for.

Among the most valuable but least appreciated experiences parenthood can provide are the opportunities it offers for exploring, reliving, and resolving one's own childhood problems in the context of one's relation to one's child.