parents

New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.

Only children simply accept the fact that their parents have the right to make choices for them. Even disobedient children never question the fact that their parents have that right. They may choose to flout the rules, but they don't question their parents' right to make those rules.

I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son.I still do.

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children__ strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn__ comprehend. Don__ ask for advice from them and don__ expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

Are parents always more ambitious for their children than they are for themselves?

Have times really changed? Don't we today, as always, love our children and want them to live righteously? Don't we today, as always, need God's divine protecting care? Don't we today, as always, continue to be at his mercy and in his debt for the very life he has given us?

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and__y some sad, strange irony__t does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

Parents have to instill the right principles in their children, but then it's up to the children to live up to those principles.

We__e had bad luck with our kids _ they__e all grown up.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

The miracle of children is that we just don__ know how they will change or who they will become.

The reasonableness of the command to obey parents is clear to children, even when quite young.

You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.

Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!