Parent-Child Dynamics Quotes

Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.

Children are far more interesting to work with than grownups. They're incredibly honest. They'll tell you exactly what they think.

Basically, when I hear the words 'family drama,' I run in the opposite direction.

Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it.

Sometimes just looking at [my parents] I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up.

There was one family drama on television when we took out 'The Fosters' - 'Parenthood'. Everybody thought it sounded like a great show, but nobody thought there was a home for it.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

Having a two-year-old is very hard. I feel like I'm in a relationship with an emotionally unstable woman who is also physically abusive and never gets in trouble for it.

Over the years, things got so bad between my mother and I, we stopped talking to each other and started communicating by putting Ann Landers articles on the refrigerator.

You’re always a kid around your parents… Unless they’re acting like children. Then you don’t get the chance.

I think I've written about family and things in 'Taipei' which could be considered Asian culture.

Whatever your age, parents generally embarrass their children. I think that's a role we have to play.

I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

Family is conflict and it's something that we all relate to.

When you say 'mother' or 'father' you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle- to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by- and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity.

My mother was a listener. I'm a talker. I'm very comfortable talking.

I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children!

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

One day when I was fourteen, I told Charlie that I hated Mother. “Don’t hate her, Jo,” he told me. “Feel sorry for her. She’s not near as smart as you. She wasn’t born with your compass, so she wanders around, bumping into all sorts of walls. That’s sad.” I understood what he meant, and it made me see Mother differently. But wasn’t there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn’t seem fair.

The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything.

I think my kids give mommy more attention than they give me.

As a child I was middle-aged and cautious compared to my impulsive father.

Even if you're not a parent, you have parents and you've been in those situations where there's a certain kind of goodbye - nothing this extreme exists, but I think that's what everyone holds onto, that common denominator that runs through this that everyone can understand.

A son is a son 'til he gets a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.