We just want you to be happy. Rand and Marybeth said that all the time, but they never explained how.
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.
People say a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child's happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has rem...
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...
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...
I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.
A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY
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...
And if you don't let a boy become a man, it's no one's fault but your own when you're still wiping his ass when he should be making you grandchildren.
Laurie herself was more focused on the years when her kids were little, when she felt so necessary and purposeful, a battery all charged up with love. Every day she used it up and every night it got m...
It comes from looking at the heart of things, from stopping to smell not only the roses but the bushes as well. It is a quality of attention to ordinary life that is so loving and intimate it is almos...
The most important gifts we can give our children are confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job
Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing w...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...