Children Quotes - Page 850

Within forty years of their arrival in the Plymouth colony, the first white settlers were afraid their children had lost the dedication and religious conviction of the founding generation. Ever since, Americans have looked to the next generation not only with love and solicitude but with a good measure of anxiety, worrying whether they themselves were good parents, fearful that their children would not turn out well.

Mothers work outside the home for many reasons; one of them is almost always because their families need their income to live up to their standards for their children.

Despite the long-term reduction in familial roles and functions, we believe that parents are still the world's greatest experts about the needs of their own children. Virtually any private or public program that supports parents, effectively supports children. This principle of supporting family vitality seems to us preferable to any policy that would have the state provide children directly with what it thinks they need.

It is misleading to discuss recent changes in family life without emphasizing the fact that for generations some Americans have had to raise children under particularly appalling pressures. Although much of what is worrying American parents is shared by them all, the most grievous problems are those that especially afflict a large minority--the poor, the nonwhite and, in various ways, the parents of handicapped children.

Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary,most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents.... As a result, the parent today isa maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read.

Recognizing that family self-sufficiency is a false myth, we also need to acknowledge that all today's families need help in raising children. The problem is not so much to reeducate parents but to make available the help they need and to give them enough power so that they can be effective advocates with and coordinators of the other forces that are bringing up their children.

The most important difference between these early American families and our own is that early families constituted economic unitsin which all members, from young children on up, played important productive roles within the household. The prosperity of the whole family depended on how well husband, wife, and children could manage and cultivate the land. Children were essential to this family enterprise from age six or so until their twenties, when they left home.

In the end, the fate of children depends on our ability to use technology constructively and carefully. The connection of childrenand technology is not simply a matter of seat belts, safe toys, safe air, water and food, additive-free baby foods, or improved television programming. These are all important issues, but to stop here is to forget that today's children will soon be adults. Technological decisions made today will determine, perhaps irrevocably, the kind of physical and social world we bequeath them and the kind of people they become.

I'm a child of the '60s, so I love the fact that we are returning to a time when artists are standing up.

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.

My dad almost died as a child from water-borne diseases in Ethiopia, and he had talked to me about digging a well in Ethiopia and I thought, I have too many friends and great people in my life that would be concerned with this subject of clean water.

The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read.

I had great parents, and they trained me well and instilled great values in me. They also taught me common sense about money and that I couldn't count on the good fortune of doing a show forever. Therefore, I never spent money I didn't have and didn't end up destitute like other child actors.

Public attitudes follow real life experience, and as marriage equality has spread to more communities, Americans have seen more freedom, stronger families, more protection for children and more fairness.

Since I've had children I don't really like horror movies.

You have to tap into the child in you. If you can get to that innocent place, then you're golden. That was the subconscious goal for me.

At the doors, people are telling me they are afraid to let their children go to the movies.

A child is a reinvigorating experience. It almost does feel like immortality, but not in the way people think. It reminds us there are universal truths that are most simply seen through the mind of a young person.

Every penny from Gossip Girl, my pension, my stocks has been spent fighting for my children.

I read that book How to Hug a Porcupine [by Julie Ross] - it's my parenting bible. They say you have to trust your children and give them freedom. I say, OK, but this is New York City!

As a child, I remember being in the pool at this pool party and having to get out of the pool to watch Nixon resign. My first idea of a president was of a guy who was a crook.

I support anything to do with the welfare and rights of children in a huge way.

I like to spend my time with my children.

It's like having children. You give birth, but then they take on a life of their own. That's what actors do for characters. It's pretty amazing.

In their 30s women really start to live... they're not children anymore, and they're not just mothers.