Maureen Johnson Quotes

Those children who have been most chastised seldom make the best men.

I hate it when I go out and I see parents going, 'don't do that', or 'stop doing that' when some kid's just hanging off a staircase or something. There's too much of this, 'don't do that'. The whole thing baffles me.

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

That's one of the surprises in the research, that's it's not young people who are smitten with their phones. It's their parents who are not paying attention to them.

It is better to give children a rule to break than to give them no rules at all.

One of the most difficult parental challenges is to appropriately discipline children. Child rearing is so individualistic. Every child is different and unique. What works with one may not work with another.

The kids get cheated out of a lot of times with their dad. They were good about it.

I would never scream at my kids, never raise my voice. But as they often tell me, they were so well behaved that screaming was not necessary.

I've never been a believer in the physical punishment of children. I don't think it is necessary.

Love exercised while duty is neglected will make children headstrong, willful, perverse, selfish, and disobedient. If stern duty is left to stand alone without love to soften and win, it will have a similar result. Duty and love must be blended in order that children may be properly disciplined.

The whole concept of 'grounding' children is utterly stupid - they just go off and rebel and don't like you. When my kids eventually come along, I don't want them to not like me.

We perhaps protect our pets better than our children.

The '70s were a different time as far as parenting was concerned. People left their kids in the car with the windows cracked while they went to the grocery store.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

I love that phrase that parents say to their children when they cry: 'I'll give you something to cry about.'

They were too young to be proper parents. They never said, 'You've got to go to bed or you'll be tired for school'. They didn't mind - they let me stay up.

My parents would, like, argue in front of us and it wasn't a big deal, whereas I know some people's parents who, if they argued, it was like, 'Oh, my God.'

Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.

I know that many people disagree with the way I disciplined my child. I also understand after meeting with a psychologist that there are other alternative ways of disciplining a child that may be more appropriate.

But I think that parents who criticise their children too much are in fact better than parents who praise their children too much.

I went home and they seemed... my parents seemed normal. They didn't seem to feel like somehow they had been victims of some Nazi camp or something.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

Children are like sponges; they start to smell after a little while.

There are only two kinds of parents. Those who think their offspring can do nothing wrong, and those who think they can do nothing right.

Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.