My wife makes fun of me by calling me a grandpa because I have very little patience for inconsiderate children. So if we're walking in the mall, and some kid goes by really fast on a skateboard, I become the grumpiest eighty-five-year-old man in the world and start screaming at them.
Parents often give middle names just so that later, when they're yelling at the kid, they can drag it out. Henry David Thoreau, you come in here this instant!
To be quite frank and honest with you, it drives me absolutely crazy when my kids fight, the sound of them fighting and not getting along.
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
~We were on a family trip to Death Valley, and there were moments when my husband and I wanted to just leave the kids there - all the whining! You think that no other kid can do it as much as yours. When they're with friends, they're great; when they're in the car with just the family, it's maddening at times. But you adore them anyway.~
There are moments when you love babies, and you're like, "God, they are the reason why we exist." Then they start crying, and you're like "God! Jesus!"
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own.
I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.
We used tea towels for gloves until we got proper ones and were always breaking our mum's ornaments. She'd come home and find us all sat in our boxer shorts, out of breath and our skin red raw. She hated it.
We always had so many kids in our family, running around the yard, sweaty little kids jumping in and out of the pool, the front door and back doors swinging open and shut, all of the parents getting pissed off telling us to stay outside.
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.
I have a 6-year-old, and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car, and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I'm really working on him about that.
You can't write a children's book that takes more than five or six minutes to read, because it will drive the parents batty. It has to be compact. Nobody thinks about the parents when they write these stupid books. I could write longer children's books, but it would actually be bad if I did.
She wasn't that tough on me, but I think she was often a little frightened - being a single parent. So it begets this quality of desired absoluteness that doesn't really exist. My sister could crack her up. She'd be getting into trouble and put the Steve Martin arrow through her head and mom would start to laugh. I didn't have the same sort of wiliness.
My mom would say I'm a good kid… but I put them through a lot. I was rejecting religion and, not permanently, also kind of rejecting the things that they'd taught me, and just trying to think for myself.
Some men go a lifetime and never have their kid blow up a car, but I have a daughter who's knocked off three cars and burned down a funeral home. Maybe that's some kind of record.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.
All good technology should be used to piss off people's parents.
It's hard having kids because it's boring... It's just being with them on the floor while they be children. They read Clifford the Big Red Dog to you at a rate of 50 minutes a page, and you have to sit there and be horribly proud and bored at the same time.
But I know I have a son who doesn't listen to anything I say and if he hears the same thing from someone else, sometimes it has a little more impact.
I came home and found that my son was taking drugs - my very best ones too!
I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.
