Parental Struggle Quotes

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

I was blessed to be able to be born here. My dad crossed. My dad illegally went through the border and was living under a bridge; he was homeless. People are making fun of him, beating him up. All kinds of things. After he kind of figured out the situation, he brought my mom over.

Being a parent is not a reasonable thing. It is a very hard thing. I am a parent and I know.

My life changed in a huge way. Mentally, I've been preparing for it for over a year now. To me, it's bigger than that. For me, it shows a lot of people that you need to fight to be in your kids' lives sometimes. You fight until you can't fight any more. That's all I was trying to be, a father in his kids' lives.

My parents are both average size. For them to have a child who was very, very different and very, very small must have been incredibly hard.

In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.

Natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.

In motherhood, where seemingly opposite realities can be simultaneously true, the role of nurturer invariably conflicts with the role of socializer. When trouble came as it surely must, was I the good cop who understood, the bad cop who terrorized, or both?

Nobody ever told me learning to let your child grow would be one of the hardest things I was going to go through!

You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair. You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.

I would always sneak in the refrigerator and eat seconds, and underneath my bed - you know, I had my own bedroom - it was littered with Twinkie wrappers and Jolly Rancher wrappers. And I would sneak-eat, because I was denied food, not because I was hungry, but because my mom and dad did the best they could in 1970 and '71 and '72.

I won't start quite at the beginning... but the emigration of my parents from Nazi Germany and their new life in the U.S.A. A one sentence summary of these events is that after some years of trouble and considerable hard work, my parents established a satisfactory if not comfortable life for themselves and their two children.

The schools that suffer are the schools in, in poor neighborhoods. They are the neighborhoods with the greatest need, with the parents struggling to work and to make ends meet. They don't have enough resources to give, they don't have enough resources to pay more, and these are the neighborhoods that go first.

As a parent you try to maintain a certain amount of control and so you have this tug-of-war ... You have to learn when to let go. And that's not easy.

Both my parents are immigrants. I've seen different struggles they've had. There's a reason you don't see me using accents. I don't do impressions of my folks. When I'm doing a crappy impression of my folks, and you're laughing, I'm thinking, 'When my parents talk to people, when they walk away do people do impressions of them? Do they laugh?'

I think my parents had a hard time dealing with me.

You want to have a loving, safe relationship with your child, but you can't because you have to do these things to protect them or protect them from themselves - or try to make sure they don't become a vampire! Your desires and your needs are in opposition, and that's always fun to play.

I was always trying to find the balance between trying my best and being an incredible parent. I literally realized that it was chaos - but it was happy chaos.

We find ourselves ordered by the Government to cast out those we have tried for so long to help. The effort of a parent to feed his or her children is criminalized.

It's difficult. I'm a single parent now, and I'm having such a battle to see my kids on a daily basis. It's so hard.

It's very hard being a mother or father and not being able to provide for your family. Your job as a parent is to keep them safe and protect them, and when aspects of that are taken away it puts these people in an awful situation.

The first boy was always the hardest.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

I was such a strong-willed child, my parents weren't sure how to deal with me.