Parental Reflection Quotes

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

You learn more about yourself through your child, I guess.

Calvin is a constant reminder that I'm not always as present as I want to be. His go-to state of being is present. So I'm really grateful of that part of being his parent.

Some of our children are our justifications and some are but our regrets

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

The biggest lesson I've learned from my children is to look in the mirror at myself, not at them. I've realized that everything I've done has had an impact on them. We have to understand that they are like little paparazzi. They take our picture when we don't want them to and then they show it to us in their behavior.

The good enough parent, in addition to being convinced that whatever his child does, he does it because at that moment he is convinced this is the best he can do, will also ask himself: "What in the world would make me act as my child acts at this moment? And if I felt forced to act this way, what would make me feel better about it?

Not everyone's a perfect parent, but we do learn, and we grow from that. I'm not trying to be harsh on my family because it does make them sad to think back about how they used to be and some of their choices.

People ask me, 'Is being a parent the be-all, end-all?' And I say, 'Oh, it definitely is up to the person, and it is difficult, it can be very difficult, and it can be extremely healing.' That's what I have found, that the children are mirrors. Everyone is a mirror, but children especially because they're day and night and all day long.

When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn't really about disapproval; it's about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent.

Children make you confront your own childhood. Which I think is common. Suddenly you're remembering your own parents as parents, not to mention the fact that you're confronted by them as grandparents. So you also have that terrible shock, a mirror image of your own. You suddenly seem to be so helpless in the face of young children. And you think, "How did you ever bring up me?"

I've been thinking a lot about next year, which will be the first time in 25 years that I don't have a child at home.

And every day that I spend as Charlotte and Aiden's mother, I think about my own mother, my wonderful, thoughtful, hilarious mother.

My mother taught me to be nice to everybody. And she said something before I left home. She said, 'I want you to always remember that the person you are in this world is a reflection of the job I did as a mother.'

The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

There's an identity thing that goes on where you spend so much time caring for your child that, after a year or so, you have to shake it off and go, 'Who am I?'

I'm one of those parents who are quite careful about documenting their children's upbringing. I really try to actively observe. I write down the little things that happen.

It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.

I live on my own, happily, and I've never wanted children, but it did occur to me one day that there's part of me in 'Torak' - he's a loner, I'm a loner - as there's part of me in 'Renn,' who's quite waspish. I think, in some senses, 'Torak' is the son I never had.

How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise.

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.