Fred Rogers Quotes

I have a two-year-old who just turned three, and my four-year-old just turned five. I have the same irrational feelings taking them to pre-school. It's this charged combination of stress and joy and anxiety and excitement. When they're away, you've got a sudden loss of purpose and this ever-present fear about the kid's welfare. The departure of our children from our nest is not an easy thing.

I love the complication of the kids in the characters' lives. I love that these two people are very capable in all these ways. They're so trained. They're kind of deadly. They're smart and vicious at times, but I love that they're undone by a teenager, like we all are. We're all incensed and undone by the ungratefulness of a child, and I love that it matters so greatly to them, in a way that it matters to every parent. Teenagers are going to do that no matter where you live or who you are.

Preschoolers have a way of grabbing your attention. Mine help me not to be a baseball player at home.

I don't do well with my children leaving the nest.

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.

The fact is that child rearing is a long, hard job, the rewards are not always immediately obvious, the work is undervalued, and parents are just as human and almost as vulnerable as their children.

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

I have four daughters, with the two youngest being four years old and a year and a half. When one of my older daughters was in sixth grade, a classmate brought in their talking Winnie the Pooh doll for show and tell, so the next week my daughter one upped her classmates and brought me to school in for show and tell.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

But from the perspective of the aging parent, there is no major difference between four and fifteen, except that when your child is four, his motoring privileges are restricted to little toy Fisher-Price vehicles which are unlikely (although I would not totally rule it out in America) to sue you.

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.

Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.

It will help at every state along the road to learning. For the pre-school years we will help needy children become aware of the excitement of learning.

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

Rich women are not too put upon by their children. You don't have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school.

One of the things I've discovered in general about raising kids is that they really don't give a damn if you walked five miles to school.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Insults from an adolescent daughter are more painful, because they are seen as coming not from a child who lashes out impulsively,who has moments of intense anger and of negative feelings which are not integrated into that large body of responses, impressions and emotions we call 'our feelings for someone,' but instead they are coming from someone who is seen to know what she does.

By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man.

There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.

You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.

There are so many common occurrences in raising children that people just can't seem to figure out.

I tried to be the greatest boxer in the world and a good parent, too. I had instant feedback on my success as a boxer. Often, parents don't really know if what they are doing is right or wrong until their child is grown and it is too late to change any of the decisions. Whatever my failings as a parent, I am very proud of all my children. It wasn't easy for them to make their own way with such a controversial and public father.