Michael Scott Quotes

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.

I raised five children. They all have different personalities. All of them have different issues, different levels of success. That was a learning experience for me.

I have 'Parents' magazine in my home.

I have made a lot of mistakes raising the four Jenner kids.

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew." "He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six." "Right." "And you're the oldest." "Yes." "That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

Raising children is like making biscuits: it is as easy to raise a big batch as one, while you have your hands in the dough.

I'm a mother of three children, and we do make mistakes.

If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.

In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.

One has very little influence upon one's children. Their characters are what they are and one can do nothing to change them.

Children can scarcely be fashioned to meet with our likes and our purpose. Just as God did us give them, so must we hold them and love them, nurture and teach them to fullness and leave them to be what they are.

Raising children is an enormously important part of life. I think one of the most important, or the most important, period.

You can't expect your children to be perfect.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

If you bungle raising your children, nothing else matters in life.

What I continue to learn as a parent is to be mindful of the fact that I am responsible for being the parent that my children need me to be and not necessarily the parent I want to be.

I tell my kids, "Look, your life is a video game, and I have to get you from level zero to 18 as an independent person with all your skills and limbs intact. Every time you hit your brother or throw food, you're taking us all back."

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

I think when you have children, it just changes your worldview.

All people, even one's own children, come with baggage. When they're little, you have to help them carry it. But when they grow up, you have to do that difficult thing of setting their baggage down and taking up your own again.

Children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.

Children, when they are little, they make parents fools; when great, mad.

The thing I like the best, especially being a parent of so many kids, Is that they're all so different. You love them all equally, but they're all so different from each other and that's the cool thing, to see their personalities start to develop and see how unique and different they all are and to be able to love them in their own unique ways. It's really, really, really special.