Betty Friedan Quotes

I don't know what happened to the millennials. I think too much coddling is not a good thing.

Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves.

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

I always told my children when they whined... Only the boring are bored.

Hyper-parenting has many pitfalls. Overprotected and overpraised children may develop an inflated sense of entitlement.

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief? Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow's share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled? Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!

A child may have too much of his mother's blessing.

You have people like Sarah Jessica Parker - and it's also because of her mother and where she came from and all that stuff - but how you're taught to be responsible for yourself rather than endlessly people waiting for you and bringing you things.

One hundred percent my mother, who would always say, "If you want something done, do it yourself." She must have said that 100 times to me - as a child, as a young woman, yesterday on the phone.

My mother took too much, a great deal too much, care of me; she over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed me with premature lessons of prudence: she was so afraid that I should ever do a foolish thing, or not say a wise one, that she prompted my every word, and guided my every action. So I grew up, seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, and judging with her understanding, till, at length, it was found out that I had not eyes, ears or understanding of my own.

Inuring children gently to suffer some degrees of pain without shrinking, is a way to gain firmness to their minds, and lay a foundation for courage and resolution in the future part of their lives.

When Patanjali says "non-attachment", he is not anti-love. Really, he is for love. Non-attachment means be natural, loving, flowing, but don't get obsessed and addicted. Addiction is the problem. Then it is like a disease. You cannot love anybody except your child - this is addiction. Then you will be in misery. Your child can die; then there is no possibility for your love to flow. Even if your child is not going to die, he will grow. And the more he grows, the more he will become independent. And then there will be pain. Every mother suffers, every father suffers.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

You can imagine an already unstable mind that's completely entitled and has been given anything they wanted, throughout their whole life, and lived in a bubble with a domineering, in a very quietly manipulating way, mother, that child mentality never gets a chance to mature and discover its own limitations. It just runs rampant.

A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.

I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!

By trying to make things easier for their children, parents can make things much harder for them.

What we teach our children is that earth is your mother that provides; she's a giver. So, please first ask forgiveness from the mother earth before you step on to it and cause it pain.

I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

Something in the heart of most human beings simply cannot abide pain inflicted on the innocent, especially children. Even broken men serving in the worst correctional facilities will often first take out their own rage on those who have caused suffering to children. Even in such a world of relative morality, causing harm to a child is still considered absolutely wrong. Period!

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother’s milk for the very first time. --from poem Blood and Blossoms

We, perhaps, have corrupted our children and our grandchildren by heedless affluence, by a lack of manliness, by giving the younger generation more money and liberty than their youth can handle, by indoctrinating them with sinister ideologies and false values, by permitting them, as young children, to indulge themselves in imprudence to superiors and defiance of duly constituted authority, by lack of prudent, swift punishment when the transgressed, by coddling and pampering them when they were children and protecting them from a very dangerous world.