Tina Fey Quotes

It's refreshing and weird when your kids get older and they're able to tell you how they feel and what they want.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.

Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.

My kids are growing up and it's hard to accept they are their own person and they're independent.

The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.

If you want to recapture your youth, just cut off his allowance.

I have a 15-year-old daughter who thinks that I always had this self confidence that I have now at the age of 60. And I always tell her that what she is going through - the low self-esteem as a teenager - that is a right of passage.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.

I can see why people keep having babies. We were looking at a school for my youngest this morning, and there were all these little boys and girls. So sweet. And then the teenagers walk past, and, my God, they're enormous, and I bet they don't kiss their mummies. I'm just going to force my children to remain lovely.

My son is 14, and I only have this time with him. True, it's not like before when I couldn't explain to a little boy why I can't read him his bedtime story six nights a week. And he's even said to me, 'Mom, if you want to do a show somewhere, you should go.'

When you're 16 and when you're 17, you're kind of walking that fine line of being an adult and legally being able to look out for yourself, while being able to look out for yourself and being treated as a child.

A mother can legitimately be said to 'have a baby' - but in a civilization such as ours, she can never claim to own a teenager.

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

When children are little, they really need you in one way. When they're bigger, they need you as a friend. And balancing motherhood and career makes you both a better mother and a better businesswoman.

Katie is like my calendar, watching her grow and change. She is growing up so fast, learning to have opinions of her own, learning that I don’t have the answers to everything. And the moment a child begins to understand that, you know you’re in trouble.

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

Parenting a pre-teen is quite something.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

Children are very addicting. Once they start growing up, you miss when they were little.

We mothers of grown-up daughters tend to view them with a mixture of love, exasperation, irritation and awe.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child's universe.