Parental Preparation Quotes

I knew the minute we announced our pregnancy that we would be bombarded with unsolicited advice. Some good and some questionable - unsolicited none the less.

I'm a full-time mom. I've never felt as prepared, as before maternity.

I work every day to live up to my mother's model. She was a very proud woman. And she really prepared me to go off into the world as a proud daughter.

I think it affected me physically and emotionally, yes. I did have my ups and downs, but I actually had more ups and downs after the shots were finished and she was pregnant because of the reality of being pregnant with twins.

In a first pregnancy, you don't have a child yet, so you can nap and see movies and exercise. The notion of 'baby' is abstract. You look at the ultrasound and don't really understand that the creature you're seeing is soon going to be your roommate.

It's so interesting that when somebody's pregnant, we are obsessed with knowing the gender of the child so we can figure out what we need to buy that child, what the present would be. Like we're pre-programming the kid before they were born.

My name is Dylan simply because my parents did not know before I was born if I would be a boy or a girl, and Dylan was a name that worked in both cases.

Women have nine months more experience than you do - nine months to prepare for being a parent.

You need to be emotionally ready for a baby, and the best way to do that is to clean skeletons from your own closest. Deal with the baggage of your childhood, or you'll just pass it on to your kid.

This bringing up of children is so blithely undertaken by many of us, and the vast majority have had no training. It is one of those professions that every woman thinks she can undertake, so nobody really prepares for it.

You need to think about how you will pay for children before you have them.

The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's not fully considered or thought out, and it gives way too easily to parental ambivalence and unhappiness.