A Quote by John Updike

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.
It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time - for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they're raising children.
Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.
It has been noticed that people who are not parents often have a peculiar fondness for children. This is sometimes attributed to a very beautiful nostalgia for a gift denied to them - dream-children, flowers that have only bloomed in imagination - but we think it is rather because they have not the faintest idea how dreadful children are.
With grown children, we can look back at both our mistakes and what we did well in our parenting, having conversations with a greater degree of honesty than was possible before. In getting older themselves, our adult children may begin to comprehend the burdens and strengths we carried from our own parents.
There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, "What was it like when you were a kid?" I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species.
I really put the fear of God into my son, because children are such sponges. The earlier you teach them the law of the land, the easier they'll accept it as an adult. I think parents who shelter their children are making a huge mistake. Kids are really pretty amazing. They can handle a lot. It's just us parents. We think we need to protect them, and then when the real world comes in, they're shattered. So I think I did the right thing in my parenting.
And children? 'I don't have any regrets about not having had children. What's the point? It's just something else to beat yourself up over.
Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.
Children tease each other because you're short or you're tall or you're a redhead or because you're ugly or because you're smart or because you're dumb or all kinds of differences and as parents we have to deal with that and strengthen our children to be comfortable with themselves and also to show empathy and acceptance towards others.
Our children learn the phonetic method, which is why they're very good spellers, I suppose. Because rather than ABC or just saying a word, they'll have to go a as in apple and all the other a's there are in the English language. They learn that when they're four. Children all over America can tell you that a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y are vowels. But you ask them about that "sometimes y," and they can't tell you.
Children are to be born into a family where the parents hold the needs of children equal to their own in importance. And children are to love parents and each other.
There are many things children accept as "grown-up things" over when they have no control and for which they have no responsibility--for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents' decision to live apart.
It is not unusual for children to follow the paths cut by their parents. You frequently see the children of doctors enter medicine, military members' children enlist. In my family, we witnessed different forms of public and community service.
I think when we talk about corporal punishment, and we have to think about our own children, and we are rather reluctant, it seems to me, to have other people administering punishment to our own children, because we are reluctant, it puts a special obligation on us to maintain order and to send children out from our homes who accept the idea of discipline. So I would not be for corporal punishment in the school, but I would be for very strong discipline at home so we don't place an unfair burden on our teachers.
Our children are not going to be just 'our children' - they are going to be other people's husbands and wives and the parents of our grandchildren.
Both sides of the aisle ought to be concerned that Merrick Garland, the top law enforcement officer in our nation, is weaponizing the FBI's National Security Branch against concerned parents while at the same time his family appears to be making millions peddling critical race theory and teaching our children to hate each other.
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