When you're a father you censor yourself. You get just as angry with a child but you don't want to say, "What the filth and foul and I'll filth and foul, filth and foul and, yeah, ya filth and foul face, and I'll filth and foul, foul, filth!" You don't want to say that to a child so you censor yourself and you sound like an idiot: "What the... Get your... I'll put a... Get out of my face!"
My dad came over to the house... went into his pocket and pulled out a handful of money, and began to pass it out to the children... This was the same man who, when I was his child, I would ask him for 50 cents, this man would tell me his life's story.
What best defines a child is the total inability to receive information from anything not plugged in.
I'm not sure if my parents had me because they loved me, or because they wanted someone to watch their other children.
Our children are trying to tell us something. And we are not listening.
It doesn't make any difference how much money a father earns, his name is always Dad-Can-I.... Like all other children, my five have one great talent: they are gifted beggars. Not one of them ever ran into the room, looked up at me, and said, "I'm really happy that you're my father, and as a tangible token of my appreciation, here's a dollar.
If you listen carefully to what a child is saying to you, you'll see that he has a point to make. So I listen. And I answer them just as seriously as possible. And if I don't know the answer, I'll tell them I don't know.
If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age ..." You were never their age. You were older in the womb.
In spite of the seven thousand books of expert advice, the right way to disciplne a child is still a mystery to most fathers and...mothers Only your grandmother and Genghis Khan know how to do it.
When I was a child, I was living in the housing projects of Philadelphia. I didn't even have a Christmas tree.
A grandchild is God's reward for raising a child.
A person with no children says, "Well I just love children," and you say "Why?" and they say, "Because a child is so truthful, that's what I love about 'em - they tell the truth." That's a lie, I've got five of 'em. The only time they tell the truth is if they're having pain.
All Children Have Brain Damage!
Anyone who has brought up children knows that consistency has absolutely nothing to do with discipline.
Some authority on parenting once said, "Hold them very close and then let them go." This is the hardest truth for a father to learn: that his children are continuously growing up and moving away from him (until, of course, they move back in).
A child who is disciplined will be more obedient and also more organized as a student.
My wife was a beautiful woman before we had children.
Grandparents are God's gifts to children.
If you took your child to the dentist and check for cavities, the child likely won't get them. If you take them just for emergency, that's all they're gonna get.
We're not raising children with the love that we need to.
Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.
Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.
The promise of American capitalism is that it makes people richer, freer and more independent. But since the introduction of Fed, the currency in which Americans keep score has so addled the figures, we scarcely know if we are winning or losing. The dollar we knew as a child - in the 1950's - is only worth a tenth as much today.
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
I don't know that I ever bought into the "American dream." I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the '50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.
