Lucy Larcom Quotes

Don't live vicariously through your kids or try to shape them into who you wanted to be, like the popular kid or an athlete. Children should be given the opportunity to be themselves.

Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.

No matter what parents do, kids retain their uniqueness.

Growing up as a child actress, there was much I got to do and yet so much that I missed out on. Therefore, when I had kids, I made it a point to make sure that they could do anything and everything that they dreamed of. A great education was definitely right at top of my list!

I am always who I am, and anyone who's known me forever will tell you that. I guess there's enough of a child in me that that's important.

Each kid is unique in what captures their attention and their passion.

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.

A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture.

I have a friend who says, 'The world doesn't need another angry dwarf!'

I started my career in parent education with the idea that we needed to let our kids go. I believed that parents were suffocating for their children. There was no room for individuality and personhood.

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

And part of that is, what is the point of having children if you don't have the privilege of bringing them up?

Children like their mothers especially to be standing still and watching them, even if they are sleeping. At least that's how I felt. There's nothing wrong with the self-interest of children; it's just the way they are.

I believe that the first 8 years are most important and the time in a child's life when parents must be absolutely and completely present.

Do people absolutely need the arts to get by day-to-day? You can make that claim, but they also really need a lot of things before that.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.

I must say that I always thought I had a voice, even when I was 4 years old.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

When Kate was born, she was born into a world of joy and happiness and confidence. The difference between the children is night and day. She's happy, she's thriving, she's full of self-confidence. I tell her she's beautiful every day before I send her off to school.

I hate the idea of making any of my children into a mini-me. That would be terrible.

To know that everything we say and do to this new little human being may have a profound effect on him or her is a daunting obligation.

It's always been a struggle to differentiate myself, but I like my parents. I enjoy doing events with them, and I don't feel I should purposely avoid something just for the sake of being different.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

What happens if parents pick an embryo thinking they're getting a boy who will grow up to be like former Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck, but instead when the child grows up, he wants to be poet?

The kids who were brought up on minefields should be able to catch up with the kids who were brought up on soccer fields.