Challenges of Parenting Quotes

Parenting is not for everybody. It changes your life. Especially when they're little.

Kids don't come with instruction manuals. It's interesting, but after you have your kids, it's a blessing. It's not as hard as people may think it is.

When people talk about wanting to have children someday, what they really mean is that they want babies. Nobody wants an angry adolescent. Nobody wants an obnoxious seven-year-old trying to wear out dirty words they just learned in school that day. What they really want is cute, adorable babies who love you and need you. The bad stuff is just the price you agree to pay for having the good stuff.

I have two dogs. If I had retarded children, I'd be a hero. And yet, the dogs are pretty much the same thing.

Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.

But parents, she supposed, were not the pinnacle of perfection their children thought or expected them to be. They were humans who usually did the best they could but often made the wrong choices.

The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard.

Years ago someone wrote [about me]: 'She characterizes Molly Weasley as a mother who is only at home looking after the children.' I was deeply offended, because I until a year before that had also been such a mother who was at home all the time taking care of her child [...] What has lesser status and is more difficult than raising a child? And what is more important?

When I was a teenager, for the most part, I had a really great, easy relationship with my mom, but there are those occasional mom/daughter things that are unavoidable. That's what makes it more upsetting and more true to life. We have great moments, and then we have terrible moments as well.

I think it is important to say that though, of course, it is wonderful to have children, it is a disservice to others not to also say how hard it is to do it alone.

Motherhood is nitty and gritty and brutal and wonderful, but everything I read is about the wonderful parts. Sometimes, you're really in the trenches!

Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.

Parenting is the easiest job to get - you just have to screw up once and it's yours.

A parent that's upset or resentful is not going to be a great paren.

Maybe "having enough" has a second meaning beyond the basic economic security a family needs. Maybe it means accepting that a rich full life with a job and family will be rewarding, but it certainly won't be perfect. As many of us who have combined kids and careers know all too well, some days it's really pretty messy. And that's OK.

I think a lot of parents are afraid to express certain emotions about children who are different, because they think that it's wrong to feel chained sometimes, to feel anger, to say to yourself, "I never wanted this." I think it's natural.

The fears and anxieties and obsessions wrapped up in being a parent.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier.

Mom used to say that having three boys was kind of like having a pet tornado that talked back.