Parental Disillusionment Quotes

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 you know your mom and dad are doing things that are not idyllic, as far as your desire to defer to a parental ideal, you start to see your parents as peers, perhaps, and that's not the healthiest thing at that early an age.

His daughter returned from her boarding school, improved in fashionable airs and expert in manufacturing fashionable toys; but, in her conversation, he sought in vain for that refined and fertile mind which he had fondly expected.

Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

I think that the ideal of parenting can make people unhappy. It's that this lie that they're being told by society that parenting is one thing - and when parenting is something completely different - that's what makes them unhappy.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

When you ask most American parents why they want to have kids, it's to bring more joy into their lives. So, when you don't feel that all-encompassing joy, it must be that something is wrong with you. I think it's dissatisfaction that the expectation was different than the reality.

I think probably everyone can relate to wanting to believe that your parents are one thing, and having to come to the realization that they might not be.

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.