Jeanette Winterson Quotes

A child's first teacher is its mother.

If you have children, you know you're responsible for somebody. You realize you are being imitated; your belief systems and priorities have a direct influence on these children, who are like flowers in a garden.

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.

There is a tension between our desire to get our kids to turn out a particular way versus letting them develop to be their own person. If there were a pill that would make my child turn out the way I wanted, I'm not sure I'd take it.

Children should have a balanced start in life: a mother and a father. I think that's the only reason to get married.

The first service a child doth his father is to make him foolish.

Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.

Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children.

Fathers have a unique and irreplaceable role in the lives of children.

A lot of mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.

I remember my mother and father arguing about light bulbs because my father thought he could save money by putting 25-watt bulbs instead of 60-watt bulbs and my mother was trying to explain to him that her children needed to learn to read so that they could go to college. He couldn't see that.

All of my children are the same way I am. They're little artists too, in their own ways.

Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.

When I was a child at sixteen, I was just a child. All sixteen year-olds are just children. As much as we like them to be adults, they are just children. And like all children, they need their mother, and they need their father. All children need their mother and their father. All children are entitled to their mother and their father.

In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.

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

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

My daughter has impressions that she does of me.

You don't know your child until they get here; you don't know their personality.

You know how kids are. They like to do what parents do.

In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.

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