Parental Perception Quotes

Some kids get called "bundles of joy" or "slices of heaven" or "dreams come true." We got "the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments." Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive.

My father described me as the oldest baby he'd ever seen. I apparently was very serious and reflective.

A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.

I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.

Everything a baby does strikes a parent as the most magical thing he/she has ever seen.

When I wrote 'Runaways,' I was a naive kid who thought that all parents were evil. Now that I'm a wise old man with children of my own, I am certain that all parents are evil.

A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.

I'm probably the most uncool guy that [my daughters] know-as far as they are concerned anyway-'cause I'm Dad. I mean dads just aren't cool-especially when I dance! They don't want me to dance.

People have to see it for what it is, but they would be so shocked to know two simple things that I just really never shared with anyone, but I spank my child at times. He didn't move a muscle, not one inch, and he didn't drop one tear. I tell you that and you are probably like, "Wow, how is that even possible?" But little details like that is not what people are able to see, and that makes the world of difference to the outcome of the situation.

Daddy, when he drank, just became sweeter. There wasn't a mean thought in his body. I've always said he was like a drunk Jimmy Stewart.

Laura and I really don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis.

Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth.

As a child I was told by my parents that I was happy, but I did not believe them.

A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.

When I noticed how my own children were effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology, at first I thought, 'My children are prodigies!' But then I noticed all their friends were like them, so that was a bad theory.

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.

As a parent, you're never wrong in your children's eyes.

Preoccupied with her self, the adolescent sees enormous changes, whereas the parent sees the child she knew all along. For the parent, new developments are superficial and evanescent. For the adolescent, they are thrilling and profound.

During a visit to California, when a friend of my grandmother's told my parents that I must be deaf because I was not responding to sounds, my father was absolutely convinced that I was simply being stubborn.

If 'gay' is not in your vocabulary, if being gay is not an option in your world, then you're far more likely to see your kid as anything but gay.

As you get older, you realise your parents aren't these superheroes. They're actually people.

Parents don't believe that lifting life-chances in one school means reducing them in another.

Like with me, I just see my mum and dad as parents - I don't see my dad individually as a man, my mum individually as a woman.

In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.