Robert J. Waldinger Quotes

I'm working on my relationship with my mother and father, but my upbringing has been very destructive.

My father wasn't really involved and my mom is the light in my life.

There will be no 'Mommie Dearest' in the lives of my children, and no books like the one the Crosby boy wrote about Bing, or Bette Davis's daughter has written. My children love me very much, and they are loved.

Not having a great relationship with my brother Aaron, or what people think that relationship should be, didn't define me.

Once you've taken account of the quality of sibling relationships, knowing about the quality of parenting doesn't add much information.

Be a father first. Don't put a priority of being a friend with your wife first, or a friend with your kids first.

Some have said that 'Frankenstein' is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

I was a middle child. I grew up in Brooklyn with three sisters and a brother. You know what that means: everybody is constantly fighting with everybody and you are in the middle of the storm trying to make peace. That is your life. Making everybody work and play well together.

If you're lucky like me, your relationship with your brother has resolved itself on the peaceful side of the fence and has stayed there. But if you're someone who's got a family that's all fractured and finding it hard to relate, that's a very sad place to be.

I had an older brother, an older sister and a younger brother, and though I look back fondly on my childhood, I think that when you've got four siblings sharing the same resources and a single kids' bathroom, it's going to get a little tense at times.

For months, my parents had been trying to prepare me for the arrival of a real sibling. They had given me a doll to play with and encouraged me to take care of her. And when the baby, a little boy they named Rahm, finally arrived, they encouraged me to help take care of him, too.

I forgive my mom for being a psycho and my dad for being a loser.

Talk about your negative experiences with the father, with your girlfriends. Not with your children. And bite your tongue when it comes to diminishing, denying, dismissing, name-calling.

The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex.

For me being the youngest, there was never ever anything that was an issue to cause rivalry between me and my sisters.

One of the things I would have loved to have had was a family that worked better together, although I love my mother and father to bits.

I guess in America we're so sold on this ideal of the perfect, well-adjusted family that is able to confront any conflict and, with true love and understanding, work things through. I'm sure they do exist, but I never knew any of them.

I noticed that when my daughter was born, my son really, really liked her. But then as she started getting older, and as she started crawling around our house and touching different things that were his, sibling rivalry issues started appearing.

My parents are very cool and wildly supportive - maybe almost too much. I want to tell them to chill out.

I've been working on my relationship with my parents and my sister over the years. We have become more close. I think having kids makes you want to keep the gang together.

Having one child makes you a parent; having two, you are a referee.

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

So many people ask, 'How could you forgive your mother for the way you were raised?' It's really not forgiveness, in my opinion. It's acceptance. She's never going to be the sort of mother who wants to take care of me.

'Like Father, Like Son' gave me the opportunity to show when it is not good with a father.