William Lyon Phelps Quotes

As a child, you are influenced by your parents' actions.

If you see in your children most of your own faults, you have failed as a parent, but succeeded as a neurotic.

Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

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

As to your families my counsel is, never lay down your authority to a wife or child, but treat them so kindly they will never want to leave you.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

Good mothers and good fathers and good families don't always have great children.

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

I wish my parents could have raised every man out there.

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

A child identifies his parents with God, whether or not the adults want that role. Most children 'see' God the way they perceive their earthly fathers.

Children, when they are little, they make parents fools; when great, mad.

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence.

Parents are heroes already - all they have to do is start acting like it.

Model the qualities that you want your children to show to each other.

Everyone of us plays 'tapes' from our parents until we die. That's why it's so important to talk good values to your child

In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family.

What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents have not lived

As the family goes, so go the children.

The family is the corner stone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.

Often parents communicate most effectively with their children by the way they listen to and address each other. Their conversations showing gentleness and love are heard by our ever-alert, impressionable children.

Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.

The child is thinking and receiving vibrational thought from you on the day that he enters your environment. That is the reason that beliefs are transmitted so easily from parent to child.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.