Parental Attention Quotes

I'm one of seven kids. That'll keep your ego in check.

Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her.

I was by far the youngest of the family, and at times it was like being an only child.

I always knew I was the center of my parents.

I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families--sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.

Elie Wiesel says that the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. If that is true, then the opposite is also true: that the greatest love we can show our children is the attention we pay them, the time we take for them. Maybe we serve children the best simply by noticing them.

One of my sisters is physically and mentally handicapped. She took a lot of my parents' attention, so I grew up in my own world, playing in my room for hours and hours.

I was more like a middle child. My youngest brother was the baby, so he got all the attention that the baby gets. And my older brothers were getting into so much trouble that I was left in the middle, doing plays. I was up to no good, but my mother didn't know it!

I happened to the be the fifth child of my family, so everybody was already grown and had left home already.

I'm the middle child.

Sibling rivalry was, and still is to this day, rampant in my family. We were all competing for my parents' divided attention.

So frequently we mistakenly believe that our children need more things, when in reality their silent pleadings are simply for more of our time.

My mother never had time for me. When you're the middle child in a family of five million, you don't get any attention.

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

I was an only child, so I was alone a lot.

I'm a single child. I wanted a little brother or a little sister growing up, but when I think about it, I'm happy I'm an only child.

By not paying attention to your body, you are putting it in the same predicament as a neglected child. How can a child be expected to develop normally if the parents pay no attention, if they ignore its cries for help, and remain indifferent to whether their child is happy or unhappy?

Given the amount of work and time my mum devoted to my sister, it left me a lot of time to play on my own. I mean, I played with kids in the street all the time, too - I definitely wasn't denied a childhood. But I do wonder whether, in a sense, acting was my way of getting noticed.

I was an only child until I was 15, so I was able to reap the benefit of that.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.

A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents' love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness.

Not to psychologize, but it's hard growing up in a family of 14 to ever feel like you're the center of the universe, or that you're that special or different. Because when it comes down to it, you're still fighting for food at the dinner table.

I'm an only child, so I don't even have nieces or nephews.

I have more pictures of my children than my father ever looked at me.