Paul G. Tremblay Quotes

I would define the new aspects of fatherhood like this: It is 75 percent amazing and 25 percent demoralizing. I think any new parent can understand exactly what I'm talking about.

For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

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

Once you do have a child, you want to talk about every detail of it. And it is really boring to all your friends, and it should be. I was really worried about even going there at all.

I actually have two children now, and sometimes I wonder if that's it. Because they do make writing and directing more complicated and more difficult, especially now that they're very young.

Before children, it's kind of easy to be solipsistic - you and your wife are in this hermetic little thing, and your own desires, wants, needs, tastes dictate your choices. Then, suddenly, all of that's gone.

To me, full-time mothering felt like way too much and yet not nearly enough. Lost in a landslide of diapers, birthday parties, and others' needs, I ached to reestablish myself.

Having children does become tied to a sense of identity and our value as humans.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

So much must I live for others, that almost I am a stranger to myself.

Becoming a parent gives you access to a whole world of feeling. It gives you a much stronger sense of life and death: becoming a father made me realise my own mortality.

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.

Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them.

In my relationship, I was giving myself away to make the relationship better, but in actuality, wasn't doing better by doing that. I became less of a man.

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

There's an identity thing that goes on where you spend so much time caring for your child that, after a year or so, you have to shake it off and go, 'Who am I?'

I think there is a moment in every parent's life where we realize that we have lost ourselves a little bit. It's a moment of looking in the mirror and going, 'I need to put on some lipstick.'

A baby comes with such responsibility. Once you become a mother, you always have a guilt trip. You always try to do the best, but you feel you can always be better.

Around a third of parents still worry that they will look like a bad mother or father if their child has a mental health problem. Parenting is hard enough without letting prejudices stop us from asking for the help we need for ourselves and our children.

As a parent, I can get so frustrated. Any parent can!

The only way I know how to do something, as cheesy as it sounds, is to become that character, and it affects me in a not so healthy way.

It's always so difficult when you've left your kids to go to work every day - you want people to like it. I just agonise over it, but I'm obsessive because I love what I do.

Having children changes your outlook 100 percent of your life.

There are many things I wish I could redo as a parent.