John Lennon Quotes

I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

I think the one thing this picture shows that's new is the psychological disproportion of the kids' demands on the parents. Parents are often at fault, but the kids have some work to do, too.

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

My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh.

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 bungle raising your children, nothing else matters in life.

… the idea that children have rights they can claim against their parents, rather than obligations, seems to strike at the heart of the most valued social institution of all, the family.

As a parent, when I fail to listen to my kids, when our kids stop bringing us our problems, we have all failed as parents and as leaders.

So much of my work is about children and/or parenting; it's something I'm drawn to without being able to completely articulate why.

Not everybody loves their children. If that was a fact, all the children would be happy and they would make happy adults. Instead, we have lots of miserable children that later became miserable adults. This is a fact. We cannot change that.

If I raised my hand to wipe the hair out of my children's eyes, they'd flinch and call their attorney.

If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?

If what you preach and what you do are inconsistent, your children will spot hypocrisy faster than anybody and do the opposite.

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Don't be a pal to your son. Be his father. What child needs a 40-year-old for a friend?

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power.

When a child enters the world through you, it alters everything on a psychic, psychological and purely practical level.

My mother never had time for me. When you're the middle child in a family of five million, you don't get any attention.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

What assurance do I have that your parenting isn't screwing me up?