Jello Biafra Quotes

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.

In terms of the frustration of my character, I suppose any teenager has probably gone through that, in terms of telling their parents, I want to do one thing, and their parent says no. I think parents sometimes forget that they were children.

Kids have *_____ never* taken guidance from their parents. If you could travel back in time and observe the original primate family in the original tree, you would see the primate parents yelling at the primate teenager for sitting around and sulking all day instead of hunting for grubs and berries like dad primate. Then you'd see the primate teenager stomp up to his branch and slam the leaves.

Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know.

There's no such thing as a teenager that listens to a single word their father says.

You discover two things when you're a teenager. One, that your parents are not the idols that you thought they were when you were growing up, if you had nice parents. And two, that you have power over them, and you can upset them and confront them and attack them.

A mother can legitimately be said to 'have a baby' - but in a civilization such as ours, she can never claim to own a teenager.

As a father of seven kids, and been a kid myself at one point, I realize you don't always make the best decisions every time out. And life is a learning experience.

Right now, my daughter's just rolling her eyes at everything I do; I'm just an embarrassment.

Our kids are in their twenties now, which is a wonderful time.

You lie when you're a teenager, I think, because your parents are treating you like you're younger and you - in your mind - think that you're so much older. You make up all of these lies because you think it's what you should do.

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.

My sons are a hell of a lot easier to get through to than my daughter is. She seems to have my number. She can just run through the buttons.

When you have little girls, you're the coolest person in the world. I know at some point that's going to end; in their adolescence I'll become the opposite of that, especially if I'm parked outside a high school party.

As a teenager, I was perpetually grounded. I was stubborn rather than rebellious.

Parents are in denial a lot of the time - everybody knows what they did as a teenager, but somehow, when they grow up, it all disappears.

When I had a kid and I went through my drama and situation, I respected my father more because it kinda made me understand what he went through with me.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

I don't know anybody that has a teenage son or daughter who at some point hasn't been like, 'God, I hate them' just under their breath. It's not meant to be literal. It's funny.

I remember for my 18th birthday, I was going to get a tattoo, and I made the mistake of thinking I was a man and telling my father, and he was like, 'Oh yeah? You better tattoo a new address on your arm, because you're not living here!' And that was the end of that discussion.

When you have kids you do grow up. I have just started realising it now-it changes the world, having children.

The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don't confront it. That is often a dynamic from childhood onwards. As a teenager, you want to be independent and do slightly furtive things.

I don't think my father considered allowing a teenager to follow his dreams was necessarily good parenting, or even parenting. I think he thought I was a teenager with teenage impulses. I'm pretty sure he knew that if he just let me follow those impulses, it would wind up being very expensive and perhaps even life-endangering.

I may have managed to build a successful technology startup that had gone public by the time my three kids hit their 13th birthdays, but don't think that bought my wife and me any special respect from our teenagers.

I grew up in a family with five kids.