Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

Cleanliness is very important. If you let kids make a total mess in the kitchen and then leave, you're not really teaching them anything.

If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone.

I went goodness knows how long without a bath.

My parents weren't rich at all.

Better a snotty child, then his nose wip'd off.

Children are like sponges; they start to smell after a little while.

He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.

Aristocrats have heirs; the poor have children; the rest keep dogs.

You think, "Aw man, I would never want somebody else's poop on my hand," but when it's your child, "Oh, it's not that bad, I'll just wash it off."

I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.

Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children's requests, even when unreasonable.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

My kids used to do things to aggravate me, too. I'd take them to a game, and they'd want to come home with a different player.

When people talk about wanting to have children someday, what they really mean is that they want babies. Nobody wants an angry adolescent. Nobody wants an obnoxious seven-year-old trying to wear out dirty words they just learned in school that day. What they really want is cute, adorable babies who love you and need you. The bad stuff is just the price you agree to pay for having the good stuff.

Tolerate no Uncleanliness in Body, Clothes, or Habitation.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood.

Obviously, discipline is necessary for children. Training is necessary for children. Just like if you want to train a vine, you have to apply physical manipulation to get it to go where you want it to go, but as it learns, then you don't have to do that.

Spare the rod and spoil the child - that is true. But, beside the rod, keep an apple to give him when he has done well.

Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, "Great. Maybe you can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

When a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains.

What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home. Whether you live alone or with a spouse, parents, and ten children, it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.

Every parent can imagine the joys of child abuse.

Anyone who has brought up children knows that consistency has absolutely nothing to do with discipline.

Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.