Childhood Expectations Quotes

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

I always knew I was going to be a mommy, and because I came from a family of three kids, I always assumed I would have three!

If I was a boy, nobody would care that I worked out six, seven hours a day when I was 9 years old, no? Why were people always saying 'poor little girl?' I liked to work out and always did more than I was asked to.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured

As the youngest child of a single immigrant mother with a third-grade education, I never thought in my wildest dreams that I'd ever be an elected official.

People have different expectations when you're younger - it's less about changing yourself into a character; they want a more natural thing. And they just want you to be able to turn up every day and carry on working. They have a horrible fear of 10- or 11-year-olds, that they're going to say 'I don't want to play today.'

There was nothing in my childhood that said, 'She's going to be first minister of the country one day.'

Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes.

It was not a secret, then or now, that there is something vaguely un-American about forcing your child to be really good at classical music performance.

When I was 10, my parents really valued success in the arts, and I thought if I was a famous 'something artistic,' that they would love me more.

Growing up, I thought I'd have at least five kids.

Just as the archetype of the supermom--the woman who can do it all--minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the"superkid" minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older.

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.

The image I'd had of myself as a child was someone I'd never be, and it was only recently that I realized it was okay to be who I was. - Cat

From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.

When I was seven and watched an episode of 'Beyond 2000' that featured a floating armchair, I thought we'd definitely have one of those by 15, at the latest.

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.

Kids are meant to believe that their stepping stone to massive money is 'The X Factor.'

Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn't have a dream. I wasn't ambitious.

When I was growing up, I never thought I would play in the NBA.

I remember people - not my family - always asking, 'Oh, so are you going to make movies when you're older?' I felt pressured, and that always kind of deterred me.

When your daughter asks you to be a fairy for her 5th birthday party... you better be a damned fairy.