John Irving Quotes

Very often when you see families it's all perfect and neat, and parenting isn't like that. You do have constant negotiations. Things are ever developing and ever changing, and you constantly have to evaluate how you deal with your kids.

Men don't want to be confused by the facts when their minds are already made up. Women know the art of negotiation - just ask the mother of a four-year-old who refuses to eat his veggies or the parent of a teenager.

Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.

You have to support your children to have a healthy relationship.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

The fundamental job of a toddler is to rule the universe.

As parents, we're human beings, too, but sometimes we're not as understanding as we'd like to be.

I have four kids; three girls and a boy. The oldest girl is 13, and has her own social life now, so there's a bit of begrudging cooperation there. It's tough.

With my son, falling off his bike is usually what makes him upset, so a hug goes a long way. But girls are more complicated; my daughter will get bummed out because her friend hurt her feelings. In that case, we'll talk about it. I'll tell her that she's a great friend, and that she needs to talk to her friends about it.

I just don't think that a lot of the time the messages we send kids prepare them for real life.

Kids have a way of letting you know if they like something or not. If a child of five says she doesn't like something, it means there is a problem.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.

I think a lot of our problems are because people don't listen to our children. It is not always easy. They're not always so brilliant that you want to spend hours with them. But it is very important to listen to them.

On her daughters: I have a 5 year old and I have a 1 year old.

All people naturally hate. My kid bites people now. I didn't teach my kid to bite anybody. Kids say mean stuff. Only through love do we get this evil out of them. Only through love and structure and discipline do they not hate. The kids that hate didn't learn anything, that's the problem.

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.

You have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other. We must find better ways to honor and support the basic goodness of our children, especially in social media.

Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations.

Grown-up people do very little and say a great deal.... Toddlers say very little and do a great deal.... With a toddler you cannot explain, you have to show. You cannot send, you have to take. You cannot control with words, you have to use your body.

Your children tell you casually years later what it would have killed you with worry to know at the time.

Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.

The moment when you are most repelled by a child's behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.