Quotes about parents

Being well cared for in nonemotional areas can create confusion in people who grow up feeling emotionally lonely. They have overwhelming physical evidence that their parents loved and sacrificed for them, but they feel a painful lack of emotional security and closeness with their parents.

Many children of such parents learn to subjugate themselves to other people’s wishes (Young and Klosko 1993). Because they grew up anticipating their parent’s stormy emotional weather, they can be overly attentive to other people’s feelings and moods, often to their own detriment.

One of the hardest things about having a child with autism, parents told me, was struggling to maintain hope in the face of dire predictions from doctors, school administrators, and other professionals who were supposed to be on their side. (p 9)

One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.

It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say "Have a great time, sweetie" while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom. It's our job. And I wanted to be a good mother.

"Do not think that just because I have the soul of a soldier and cannot speak soft words that it was not hard for me or that because I left, I did not love." said Valhallarama.

"His father was killed in a war several years ago, and Eliar became his mother’s only support. [...] [His] mother needed his soldier’s pay to keep eating. [...] Your father was unlucky enough to get in his way while he was showing his veneration for his parents. Isn’t that sort of what you were doing when you were planning to kill him before Althalus came along?”

“It’s not the same thing at all, Bheid [...] My father was the Aryo of Osthos. Eliar’s father was just a common soldier.”

“And do you believe that Eliar loved his father less than you loved yours? We all love and revere our parents, Andine, and the peasant or common soldier loves—and grieves—as deeply as the aristocrat. You might want to think about that just a bit before you launch yourself into your next tirade.”

For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated. (p. 100)

Career criminals and philosophers have a surprising amount in common - they are both at odds with society, they both live uncompromisingly by their own rules, and they both make really lousy parent figures.

Honestly, with all the noise a father makes about demanding respect and obedience, I don't think there can be a father in the world who doesn't, at the bottom of his heart, want a simple thing: for his son to like him.

To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.