John Mason Brown Quotes

Kids teach you a lot of patience.

I try to listen to my children. I try to change with my children.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

You have to support your children to have a healthy relationship.

When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.

Caring for children is a dance between setting appropriate limits as caretakers and avoiding unnecessary power struggles that result in unhappiness.

With my son, falling off his bike is usually what makes him upset, so a hug goes a long way. But girls are more complicated; my daughter will get bummed out because her friend hurt her feelings. In that case, we'll talk about it. I'll tell her that she's a great friend, and that she needs to talk to her friends about it.

I'm not a parenting expert by any means, but I've been interviewing and writing about kids for almost 20 years.

I love kids, but they are a tough audience.

It is my contention that most people are not mugged every day, that most people in this world do not encounter violence every day. I think we prepare people for violence, and I think it just as important that we prepare people for the definition of being gentle. ... for so many years gentle has been equated with weakness but it requires more strength to be gentle. So it's the every day encounters of life that I think we prepare children for and prepare them to be good to other people and to consider other people.

It's tough to work with kids. Kids are animals!

I read somewhere that your voice towards your children becomes their inner monologue. That was so interesting to me, and I think that pertains to 'Better Things' as well.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.

I told my children, 'I don't like children.'

It's really hard to figure out what they need to know. And that's parenting, in general. It's hard to figure out what would benefit your kids and what would just make them needlessly frightened.

You need to be able to sit down and talk to your children.

A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.

When your little child tells a lie, do not rush at him as though the world were about to go into bankruptcy. Be honest with him. A tyrant father will have liars for his children; do you know that? A lie is born of tyranny upon the one hand and weakness upon the other, and when you rush at a poor little boy with a club in your hand, of course he lies.

There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

A parent who has never apologized to his children is a monster. If he's always apologizing, his children are monsters.

The moment when you are most repelled by a child's behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.

I'm not good with children," the god confessed. "Or people. Well, any organic life forms, really.

The good enough parent, in addition to being convinced that whatever his child does, he does it because at that moment he is convinced this is the best he can do, will also ask himself: "What in the world would make me act as my child acts at this moment? And if I felt forced to act this way, what would make me feel better about it?