Judith Viorst Quotes

Nobody's gonna be a perfect parent, you know? We're all doing the best we can.

That undeniable love for your child... that's something I totally get. And the bumps in the road, too. Like, any parent that thinks they have a perfect relationship with their child is a liar, or they're just not present.

Anybody who thinks they're the perfect parent is a fool.

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

I think I'm a good dad. It's hard. Ultimately, it's our kids that have the final word. So we'll have to ask them.

If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

Everybody thinks they have the answer to how to be a good parent. Here's mine: Everybody's gonna make mistakes.

My greatest fear is that I'll fail my kids.

Sometimes it's a bizarre, fairly cold, and horrifying thing to be a parent.

When you have kids, you instantly feel that you do not want to do them wrong. Those dads that go off to Florida and start a new life, I couldn't imagine that: seeing my kid once every Christmas, every three years. If I'm gone for six days it feels like too much.

In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.

So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.

There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do.

There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there.

There may be illegitimate parents but there are no illegitimate children.

As kids, we grow up thinking our parents are perfect and flawless - well, some of us - but they're trying to do the best they can.

I have two kids, and anyone who has a kid in order to feel loved is going to be in trouble because kids are first and foremost all about themselves. They'll say they love you, but 10 seconds later they'll turn on you.

The frustrations and joys of parenthood are just hard to understand until you have a kid... the constant fight you're having with yourself, like loving being with your kid but also being kind of bored and wanting to look at your iPhone - it's kind of an interesting thing that's hard to write about before you've experienced it.

There's no vacation from being a parent.

Being a parent is such a difficult business; you don't always get things right. And also, you don't want to be a perfect parent... You need people to be human, and part of it is imperfection.

I'm not sure what it means fully to be a parent.

With the single parent model, you experience betrayal differently. You experience lying from your kids differently.

Everything a parent chooses to do in their life will forever haunt their kids.