I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: "He is nothing but a boy -- a little boy!

Relationships are built on small, consistent deposits of time. You can't cram for what's most important. If you want to connect with your kids, you've got to be available consistently, not randomly.

Ronan taught me that children do not exist to honor their parents; their parents exist to honor them. [...] Ronan was mine but he never belonged to me. This is not an issue of ownership. A child is not a couch.

Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings. Once the lights are out, you can expect at least an hour of inmates clanging their tin cups on the cell bars.

My heart broke not only for the daughter who already was forced to become her mother's alarmingly narrow ideal, but also for the middle daughter who knew that her in mother's mind she had already failed.

The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future

This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone’s responsibility; all adults were "aunties" and "uncles".

Why is every mom's concern about sex? There are more important things in life, like school, careers, poetry, books, ice cream, or learning how to make the perfect chocolate cake. It's so damn frustrating.

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing.

You know, bullying," her mother began. "I see it every day. Kids get bullied at school, they get cyber bullied, text bullied, Myface bullied." "Oh, God!" Arista groaned. "It's My Space or Facebook. Not Myface.

In its complexity and sensuality, nature invites exploration, direct contact, and experience. But it also inspires a sense of awe, a glimpse of what is still "un-Googleable" . . . life's mystery and magnitude.

As a parent who raised his children in dysfunction, I know the parental wounds my children received were not intentional; often they were my best expression of love, sometimes coming out sideways, not as I intended.

Since we have had this baby with us, I have never again wondering why I never got pregnant. There is no doubt in my mind that God, in His wonderful way, was saving us to be the parents of this wonderful little boy.

Being a parent is dirty and scary and beautiful and hard and miraculous and exhausting and thankless and joyful and frustrating all at once. It’s everything. (Confessions of a Scary Mommy, Gallery Books 2012).