Parenting norms Quotes

I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.

I don't believe in bringing children into the world out of wedlock.

The '70s were a different time as far as parenting was concerned. People left their kids in the car with the windows cracked while they went to the grocery store.

Are anybody's parents typical?

To be honest, I know that a lot of Asian parents are secretly shocked and horrified by many aspects of Western parenting.

Just as the archetype of the supermom--the woman who can do it all--minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the"superkid" minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older.

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

Nowadays you can't even spank your kids. No, gotta give 'em a time out. My dad would take time out of his busy day... to whip our ass.

The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don't pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good.

I love gay and lesbian parents. But I think we need a law that says lesbians and gay men have to raise their children together. This way, the kids would not only know how to build bookshelves, but they'd also instinctively know how to decorate them.

In our society leaving baby with Daddy is just one step above leaving the kids to be raised by wolves or apes.

In Sweden, we've moved away from the notion that mothers have some magical, special bond with children.

I was a closet pacifier advocate. So were most of my friends. Unknown to our mothers, we owned thirty or forty of those little suckers that were placed strategically around the house so a cry could be silenced in less than thirty seconds. Even though bottles were boiled, rooms disinfected, and germs fought one on one, no one seemed to care where the pacifier had been.

Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.

Once you have a kid, it's amazing how quickly people ask, 'So are you going to stop at just one?'

Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic.

In terms of parenthood, I think the pressure has amped up massively too. Some parents are setting the bar ludicrously high in terms of doing things "right," and seeing children more as products to be perfected than simply children.

Not that we didn't have close relationships with our parents - I'm very close to my mom - but parents didn't think anything of going off for a few weeks and leaving their kids.

I think we've moved to thinking of parenting and pregnancy as something in which you should lose yourself.

We should be the natural home for young mothers. But we're not. Because too often we sound like people who think the only good mother is a married mother.

Parents go to sleep early. This is universal.

While childless couples are constantly asked, 'Why they are not having children,' my husband and I are bombarded with a different set of questions: 'Why would you have so many?' or 'Are you done having children?'

America's parenting customs can shock foreigners.

I've got letters from all over the world saying what you're describing as American parenting is Chilean middle-class parenting, or it is Finnish middle-class parenting, or it is Slovak middle-class parenting.

Ours is the first society in history in which parents expect to learn from their children, rather than the other way around. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come about at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, we are an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids.