The passion for such children contains no ego motive of anticipated reciprocity; one is choosing against, in the poet Richard Wilbur's phrase, 'loving things for reasons'. You find beauty and hope in...
Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the h...
She didn't know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.
It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something...
Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove...
A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY
A man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.
As a young father it's important to remember that, when you're at the beach, there's a BIG difference between telling your five year old son to just go pee in the ocean and telling him to get in the w...
No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.
Your father, Jo. He never loses patience, never doubts or complains, but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and...
What doesn't kill you will make you stronger
To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regardi...
There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is—the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It’s too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into...
Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage pa...
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.
It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing the...
If one were to list all the cruelties and maltreatments, both physical and emotional, that parents and adults inflict on children under the guise of love, the list would be a long one. But, going beyo...
How much [vastly {immensely (unfathomably) tremendously}...] Anwar loves [t]his child. It continues to take him by surprise [even when she confounds him with the havoc of her room {for example} which...
God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
Surely, our greatest parental hope is that our children attain a state of righteousness. It is the only sure road to happiness. But to attain such a state requires that they be decent as well as compl...