Benjamin Spock Quotes

I was so determined not to pass on to my children what I perceived to be the faults of my upbringing.

As everyone, you do end up becoming your mother, but also as you're acting, I find out you become every member of your family, bits come out without you really wanting them to come out.

I think we're all a lot more like our parents than we want to admit.

I think in any father-son relationship, there's going to be times you say, 'Well, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.'

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

Sometimes, when I'm scolding the kids, I sound just like my mom. I'm like, 'How did Jonetta get in here?'

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

Drugs will turn you into your parents.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

The fundamental human truth underpinning 'Ox Mountain Death Song' is that men so very often turn into their fathers. The way that everything gets passed down.

Sometimes when you have children they're the opposites of you.

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

It's a funny thing when you know someone and you meet their siblings - you get so much a sense of who they are because when you can recognize similar traits in the family, you understand exactly why they are the way they are.

My father was always getting excited about something. It's genetically inside me somewhere.

For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers.

I think with motherhood and child-rearing in general, everyone's going to tell you how to do it and why. I've always said to other mothers and women when they've asked me, that you have to find your own way and find out what works for your family, at all costs.

You draw the best things from your parents and family. You're going to pick up some of the bad things as well - there's a temper that runs through my dad's side of the family that I'm not especially keen on picking up a giant block of.

I've said it before - and I'll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary; through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us.

I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.

We're living in a time when parenting is not at all mirroring the way I was parented. For me, I just followed my parents around on their errands; when they were busy on the phone, I was quiet. It's a different kettle of fish these days: They run the house, and you listen to their music, and you go to their appointments.

I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.

I am truly my mother's son.

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

I know I've got a lot of my mother in me.

When I was doing 'Family Ties,' I was not quite that mellow as a real father. In fact, my wife used to call me Captain Von Trapp from 'The Sound of Music.' I tended to be a little more authoritarian. I had been a very disciplined child myself, so I made the mistake of thinking one size fits all.