Quotes about children

I've come to believe that children live for the satisfaction of surprising their parents...

...there is the fact that having a child transforms the basic marriage relationship. No longer are you simply husband and wife, you are mother and father as well, and all spontaneity vanishes immediately.

No, there's no experience quite like having children, and despite the challenges we once faced, I've considered myself blessed because of the family we created.

"My point is simply that kids turn out okay as long as the parents are involved, no matter where they live. It's not like small towns have a monopoly on values. I mean, I'm sure if I did some digging, I'd find lots of kids that were in trouble here, too. Kids are kids, no matter where they live."

Most of the parents I interviewed for this book said they would never want other children than the ones they had, which at first seemed surprising given the challenges their children embody. But why do any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined? If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children—brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished—I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.

Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement distractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.

Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.

In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.

The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders’ pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders’ spiritual scurvy simply because they’re new.

It is an easy thing for a prince to call the spears, but in the end it is the children who pay the price.

What good is peace if it must be purchased with the blood of little children?

Men of honor will do things for their children that they would never consider doing for themselves.