Flexible Parenting Quotes

I'm pretty earthy; I nursed forever because I liked it and my kids liked it, but at the same time I'm very laissez-faire about stuff like bedtimes and food.

Don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.

I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called "experts" have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won't take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, "I don't like this advice," the parent won't feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.

A home life where it's so full of so many rigorous ideas about the way things should be, this word "should," I think is absolutely toxic to children. It hurts their personalities, it hurts their points of view in the world, it hurts their ability to be open and caring and curious. An element of allowance in a family, is, I think, really a positive thing.

I think I get in trouble sometimes, especially when it's like I need to be easier on [my] kids because maybe I'm a rule-follower now. I'll look at something like the kids' coloring or something and I'm like, "That's not the way that marker should be used." All imagination is gone, and it's just like, "Here's the proper way that we use a marker," you know? Maybe that's a dad thing.

The primary part of the weekend is centered around my children, and I have to be flexible. To call an audible is to be liquid enough to understand that at any given time you have to be a chauffeur or a chaperone, especially for my 12-year-old and whatever her plans are.

I'm the most inappropriate dad. I curse in front of my kids and their friends. I let my kids watch R-rated movies. I'll walk by the movie theater and say, 'Let's go see that,' and my kids will say, 'No, it's rated R. It's not appropriate for kids.' I'm like Uncle Dad. We have fun. I don't live with them, but I drive over four days a week.

Some of the most interesting and happiest kids I've seen have lived with a lot of different adults, because a kid can go up to one guy and wear him out. And as soon as the adult gets tired, there are five other guys, or five other chicks to go and wear out, and the kid gets to be very bright - and tolerant, you know, with that many kinds of people around.

I think some men like to be hands-on dads. It's up to individuals. We did it the way that suited us.

I wanted to be supportive of parents rather than to scold them. The book set out very deliberately to counteract some of the rigidities of pediatric tradition, particularly in infant feeding. It emphasized the importance of great differences between individual babies, of the need for flexibility and of the lack of necessity to worry constantly about spoiling.

Even when my parents were together, they both had to travel and work, and it wasn't like they had nine-to-five jobs. In that way, it wasn't a normal family life. We'd go and stay for a few weeks with Dad on tour and bring a tutor with us.

The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

I know there are parents who are very structured and organized and are certainly far more together than I am, it's just not me.

There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it 'jazz parenting.'