One day I have a revelation. ‘I think we’re actually quite compatible,’ I tell him. ‘You’re irritable, and I’m irritating.

A blown kiss is not a proper kiss. Hugs and kisses should be hugs and kisses, not breaths of air. I am tired of breaths of air and not enough hugs and kisses.

Don't be so quick to count out the teenagers. Some of the world's greatest changes, brilliant poetry, and innovations have come from the teenage mind.

We must return to optimism in our parenting. To focus on the joys, not the hassles; the love, not the disappointments; the common sense, not the complexities.

Stories of her children when they were small, their round little bodies barely containing their personalities, which bloomed and glittered and melted into her.

Children...need most of the same things adults need--consideration, respect for their work, the knowledge that they and the things they do are taken seriously.

If you would have a boy to despise his mother, let her keep him at home, and spend her life in petting him up, and slaving to indulge his follies and caprices.

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.

Reading is a source of liberation. Children who are taught to read early on, are commonly taught to communicate in other significant verbal and nonverbal ways.

In the shimmering ignorance of illiteracy of compassion and faith the stoic desire of loving without temporal gains rules the hearts and minds in deeds and care

You don’t look like anyone special at all,” I tell him. And I curse him. And I start a club to hate him. And I make a magic spell to get rid of him.

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.