This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The first and finest lesson that parents can teach their children is faith and courage." - Smiley Blanton
"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." - Socrates NULL
"Parents should live for their children, but not through them; the parents whose satisfactions are wholly reflections of their children's achievements are as much monsters as the parents who neglect their offspring. Nothing can deform a personality so much as the burden of a love that is utterly self-sacrificing." -
"No wise man can have a contempt for prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he." - William Hazlitt
"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children." - Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
"How many parents experience the child's reactions in terms of his being obedient, of giving them pleasure, of being a care to them, and so forth, instead of perceiving or even being interested in what the child feels for and by himself?" - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them." - Frank A. Clark
"Indecision and delays are the parents of failure. " - George Canning
"While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children." - Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg
"Religious education in the true sense is to encourage the child to understand his own relationship to people, to things and to nature. There is no existence without relationship; and without self-knowledge, all relationship, with the one and with the many, brings conflict and sorrow. Of course, to explain this fully to a child is impossible; but if the educator and the parents deeply grasp the full significance of relationship, then by their attitude, conduct and speech they will surely be able to convey to the child, without too many words and explanations, the meaning of a spiritual life." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"A good education is generally considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor; but in the majority of cases is reflects credit on the wise solicitude of his parents or guardians, rather than on himself." - James Cotter Morison, fully James Augustus Cotter Morison
"What always puzzles me is why parents aren't more alarmed about the impact of television content, and why they don't make their concerns felt, but they don't." - Joan G. Cooney, fully Joan Ganz Cooney
"I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap, artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself, to the light which God has kindled and kept alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interests of parents who desire their children grow up in favour with God and with men." - Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
"I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap, artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself, to the light which God has kindled and kept alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interests of parents who desire their children grow up in favour with God and with men." - Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
"When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together." - Joseph Addison
"...There are many other facets to the current collapse of childhood. I have touched on the issue only briefly, but one thing is clear, our schools have deteriorated because they must deal with damaged goods. Most responsible for this damage is hospital childbirth; second comes television. Next comes day care, which fosters television and is a result of hospital childbirth. Premature schooling runs fourth. (A fifth must wait a bit for discussion.) And as our damaged children grow up and become the parents and teachers, damage will be the norm, the way of life. We will habituate to damage. Nothing else will be known. How can you miss something you can't even recognize, something you never had?" - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!" - Jules Henry
"The secret cruelties that parents visit upon their children are past belief. " - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
"Seven Laws of Salem: Give children the opportunity for self-discovery. [Give them a chance to discover themselves.] Make the children meet with triumph and defeat. [See to it that they experience both success and defeat.] Give the children the opportunity of self-effacement in the common cause. [See to it that they have the chance to forget themselves in the pursuit of a common cause.] Provide periods of silence. [See to it that there are periods of silence.] Train the imagination. [Train the imagination, the ability to participate and plan.] Make games important but not predominant. [Take sports and games seriously, but only as part of the whole.] Free the sons of the wealthy and powerful from the enervating sense of privilege. [Free them of the rich and influential parents and from the paralysing influence of wealth and privelege.] " - Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
"Adolescents sometimes say..."My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention. " - Laurence Steinberg
"Most adults would not dream of belittling, humiliating, or bullying (verbally or physically) another adult. But many of the same adults think nothing of treating their adolescent child like a nonperson. . . . Adolescents deserve the same civility their parents routinely extend to total strangers." - Laurence Steinberg
"The educating of the parents is really the education of the child children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves." - Laurens van der Post
"It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them." - Leo Busacaglia
"The Golden Rule of Parenting is; do unto your children as you wish your parents had done unto you!" - Louise Hart
"Conditional love is love that is turned off and on....Some parents only show their love after a child has done something that pleases them. "I love you, honey, for cleaning your room!" Children who think they need to earn love become people pleasers, or perfectionists. Those who are raised on conditional love never really feel loved." - Louise Hart
"Children belong in families, which, ideally, serve as a sanctuary and a cushion from the world at large. Parents belong to society and are a part of that greater world. Sometimes parents are a channel to the larger society, sometimes they are a shield from it. Ideally they act as filters, guiding their children and teaching them to avoid the tempting trash." - Louise Hart
"In healthy families, children discover (through being listened to) that what they have to say is important and that their experiences and ideas (and they themselves) have worth. They are encouraged to think for themselves, express opinions, and make decisions for themselves. Parents supporting them in standing on their own two feet and doing what they think is right. Trusting and gaining confidence in themselves, they develop an inner locus of control." - Louise Hart
"Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents—these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures—are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing—not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness—so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
"The child’s parents are not his makers but his guardians." - Maria Montessori
"If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out." - Marian Wright Edelman
"The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble. " - Marian Wright Edelman
"I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this because it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never know until it's too late to do anything about it, how sweet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it for them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given. Every day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself." - Marian Wright Edelman
"In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction." - Marion Woodman
"One important reason to stay calm is that calm parents hear more. Low-key, accepting parents are the ones whose children keep talking." - Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher
"A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind." - Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
"Education, whether for success or failure, is never finished. Building and sustaining the settings in which individuals can grow and unfold, not "kept in their place," but empowered to become all they can be, is not the only task of parents and teachers, but the basis of management and political leadership--and simple friendship. " - Mary Catherine Bateson
"Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children." - Mignon McLaughlin
"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past." - Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
"Empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas. There’s nothing that would do so much to avoid the danger of a two-tiered society, of a class-based society. And there’s nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds. " - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair." - Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
"So then what will be acceptable to take as a model (fa) for order (zhi)? How would it be for everyone to model themselves on their parents? Those in the world who are parents are many, but those who are ren (humane, good) are few; if everyone models themselves on their parents, this is modeling not-ren. Modeling not-ren — it's not acceptable to take that as a model." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
"Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Parents establish an emotional climate which, like atmospheric climate, is warm or cold, mild or harsh, conducive or destructive to growth. Parents give their children firm but tender, loving care through positive strokes, thus encouraging constructive scripts. Or, they discount them, thus encouraging destructive or nonproductive scripts. The best thing parents can do for their children is to evaluate their own script and then decide whether it is worth passing on to another generation." - Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward
"Our most important task as parents is raising children who will be decent, responsible, and caring people devoted to making this world a more compassionate place. " - Neil Kurshan