Maggie Smith Quotes

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

Being a parent is the hardest thing in the world... the psychological toll it takes on you because these lives are in your hands. I take it very seriously.

It's nice to have a pause to parent and to be more present at home, teaching them how to drive cars and navigate boys and all this sort of thing.

Parenting is the most important job on the planet next to keeping Gary Busey off the nation's highways.

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

I have learned that raising children is the single most difficult thing in the world to do. It takes hard work, love, luck, and a lot of energy, and it is the most rewarding experience that you can ever have.

I always knew I wanted to have children and that I'd be a great parent because I feel that's one of the reasons I was born, almost.

I did not want to take a troop. I was the mother of a little boy. I knew nothing about little girls.

One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.

Parenting is more than a numbers game: it's a question of whether people are equipped for the toughest job they will ever be asked to do.

Children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.

This is our first task-caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

Raising a child is like taking care of someone who's on way too many shrooms, while you yourself are on a moderate amount of shrooms. I am not confident in my decisions, but I know you should not be eating a mousepad.

Do the best you can. And remember that the greatest asset you have in this world is those children who you've brought into the world, and for whose nurture and care you're responsible.

I think parenting is a huge responsibility. It was in my time when I was growing up and there still continues to be that responsibility.

Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying.

When I was 19, I was in a horrific car accident, and it taught me that at the end of our life, we ask all these questions. And my questions, I discovered, were: Did I really live my life? Did I love? Did I matter? And I was unhappy with the answers.

Good parents have children who do terrible things and vice-versa.

To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.

The purpose of life is to find out 'Who am I?', 'Why am I here?' and 'Where am I going?'

Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

Even as a kid- do all kids think about this? I hope they don’t, I hope my kids don’t think about this- I was always thinking about, "Well, what are we doing? What is this all about?"