A Quote by Pat Conroy

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

Pat Conroy

Quote Topics

Parenting Damaging Early Go How I Want You Ignore Ignore Me Just Kids Know Little Look Me Mother Parents Part Somehow Understand Up Want Were Your

Quote Author

Pat Conroy
American - Writer
October 26, 1945 - March 4, 2016

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.

Paul Reiser

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US - in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.

Maya Angelou

I remember being told by my parents when I was 4 that I couldn't go to an amusement park advertised on TV because colored kids weren't allowed there. That was a bit of a shock and really stayed with me over the years. That was how I first learned about racial segregation. Fortunately, I took it as a challenge, early on, and it motivated me. You never know how a child might respond to discrimination. It goes both ways. Some kids become embittered.

Clarence Page

I want to be the best role model I can be for my family. I want my husband and I to be the ones our kids look to for guidance, to be the great role models that I had with my parents growing up, so for as hard as we work, I want our kids to see us having fun. I want our kids to know that we have to feel our bodies. And nutrition is a huge part of that.

Kerri Walsh

Parenting is something that I got early, because when you grow up without a father being there, and you see a single mother struggle to feed the kids, you do not want to put your own blood through that.

Rza

It's like the old thing: The parents stay together for the kids, but the kids know that you don't want to be together. The kids would rather you be happy - and separate - than together and miserable. I don't want my kid to grow up around two parents who just don't work.

Jaime Pressly

Somebody saying something offensive to you, or insulting to you, is not pleasant, but it's part of life. And my belief is we need to shore ourselves up, and our kids up and our younger generation up to understand how to deal with that unpleasant reality, because we won't always be there to protect them. And you know, I for one want my own kids to know how to handle that.

Megyn Kelly

Some kids go walking in the mountains, but I just went to the cinema. So when I told my parents I wanted to be an actor, even though this wasn't normal for Arab kids or anyone in the town, they were sort of expecting it and were very supportive.

Tahar Rahim

Kids are kids. They still need handholding. No matter how trained they are, they need to be told what to do. They need to learn lines and understand blocking. You can't just say, 'I want you to walk from here to there and deliver your line.'

Sean Baker

There’s a belief now that the problem with our schools is parents, that if we just had better parents we would have better performing kids and, therefore, we wouldn’t have a problem at all. But what’s missing in that equation is that you do have a lot of parents in this country who are very involved in their children’s education and who do want something better. They want to see better for their kids. They know that they’re in schools that aren’t performing particularly well and if you look at how we treat those parents, it is quite poorly.

Michelle Rhee

I think I'm not in this work to not look at life as it is. I'm not in it to say, "I want to wear a mask and escape," you know. I want to know what's happening in the world, and I want to have it touch me in a way that I can do something, my little part like that, and have it somehow translate.

Jake Gyllenhaal

I cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast.

Caroline Leavitt

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, 'How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?' The honest answer is, I don't know.