Parental Indifference Quotes

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.

My sister and I never engaged in sibling rivalry. Our parents weren't that crazy about either one of us.

I am just happy that I have children. I don't care what they want to do!

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?

When I was a kid I got no respect. I told my mother, I'm gonna run away from home. She said, On your mark.

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

My father never really encouraged me or even took an interest after I walked away from the family business. No one did except my mother and my grandfather. To be truthful, I cannot remember one meaningful conversation I had with my father.

This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.

When I phoned up and said, 'Mum, I'm doing a 52-date national tour with Eddie Izzard,' she said 'That's nice, dear. How are you?'

My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.

I was about six years old, still Daddy's little girl, even though Daddy couldn't care less about me. How could I expect any man every would?

Every show I've been on, my kids pay no attention. They're just like, 'Who cares. It's just dad's job.'

My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, in a really rundown old house. I'd stay out till 8:30, 9:00 at night. Just blow in. My mom and dad never really cared much. It was okay. We were pretty free to roam. I mean, I had no concept of stopping play. It just didn't occur to anyone.

My parents had no interest in spending a lot of time with me. They were busy doing what they were doing, but they were not obnoxious. They were fabulous.

If my children were as unhappy as I was at school, I'd send them somewhere else, but it never occurred to my parents.

My parents ... are more like cats. They accidentally had a litter of kittens, and then emotionally moved on to whatever ball of yarn rolled past their line of sight.