To a small child, the perfect granddad is unafraid of big dogs and fierce storms but absolutely terrified of the word "boo."
Today's Parenting Tip: Treat a difficult child the way you would your boss at work. Praise his achievements, ignore his tantrums and resist the urge to sit him down and explain to him how his brain is not yet fully developed.
A child seldom needs a good talking to as a good listening to.
The trouble with learning to parent on the job is that your child is the teacher.
If indeed the death of a child is part of a larger plan, you wonder if God ever considered a smaller plan.
The world is as many times new as there are children in our lives.
For every person you can trust, there was first a child who was trusted.
Each day, awakening, are we asked to paint the sky blue? Need we coax the sun to rise or flowers to bloom? Need we teach birds to sing, or children to laugh, or lovers to kiss? No, though we think the world imperfect, it surrounds us each day with its perfections. We are asked only to appreciate them, and to show appreciation by living in peaceful harmony amidst them. The Creator does not ask that we create a perfect world; He asks that we celebrate it.
I have fancied myself a rebel, but at every critical moment of my life, I have been exactly the child my parents raised.
We are each a dozen people who were all the same child.
There is a child in every one of us who is still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly-lit front porch.
If you teach your children nothing else, teach them the Golden Rule and "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.
In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.
What if man were required to educate his children without the help of talking animals.
It is one thing to show your child the way, and a harder thing to then stand out of it
Conspicuously absent from the Ten Commandments is any obligation of parent to child. We must suppose that God felt it unnecessary to command by law what He had ensured by love.
You will find that if you really try to be a father, your child will meet you halfway.
What you must accept as a parent is that you cannot always be there for your child without sometimes ruining everything.
Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war.
Marriage is nature's way of ensuring that a woman picks up some mothering experience before she has her first child.
I tell my child, if I seem obsessed to always know where you've been, it is because my DNA will be found at the scene.
The hardest thing about reality is returning to it after an hour inside your child's mind.
Once you become the mommy or daddy in your child's world, it is the only world in which you exist, no matter how much you fancy there is a separate world of your own.
In a dark moment I ask, "How can anyone bring a child into this world?" And the answer rings clear, "Because there is no other world, and because the child has no other way into it."
To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life?
