Diana Gabaldon Quotes

Taking care of children was not something I was good at.

Raising a child is an on-the-job kind of thing. There aren't a whole lot of manuals for that.

Parents are supposed to instruct their kids. It doesn't mean they necessarily have that gift of teaching.

I know of no more sacred duty than to rear and educate a child.

Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.

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.

The bearing and the training of a child Is woman's wisdom.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

I think the main thing is trying to be fair, sometimes there has to be a little bit of discipline, maybe even punishment involved in trying to make your child understand, learn from bad experiences and make sure they don't happen again.

To have a baby, raise him and educate him, is something very valuable. But we, as a society, don't see it that way.

I would love to have kids one day. In fact, I'm pretty good with them. I grew up with five half-siblings, the youngest of whom is 11 years younger than me, so I think I learned some pretty cool parenting skills quite early on in life.

I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.

Good mothers and good fathers and good families don't always have great children.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.

The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching.

I have very little patience with children.

There's no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, 'We're gonna have to clean that up because you don't paint with coffee on a table.'

I want to have a bunch of kids so I can boss them around.

Fathers like to have children good-natured, well-behaved, and comfortable, but how to put them in that desirable condition is out of their philosophy.

Child-rearing is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

I have an equal amount of patience as my grade-school children, which is not great.

Kids teach you a lot of patience.

I'm not a goody-two-shoes. I'm just a father with four children.