If you want your children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.

Abigail van Buren

I see the mind of a five year old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

Sylvia Aston Warner

Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well together? Perhaps the best answer is the one I heard from a psychiatrist recently: "Because they have a common enemy -- the parents.

Sydney J. Harris

A baby-sitter is a teenager who comes in to act like an adult while the adults go out and act like teenagers.

Harry Marsh

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

George Bernard Shaw

The best way to get a puppy is to beg for a baby brother -- and they'll settle for a puppy every time.

Winston Pendelton

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave
When they think their children are naive.

Ogden Nash

Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents-to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.

Ellen Galinsky

On Sacagawea's decision to raise her son herself instead of joining Captain Clark after she helped Lewis and Clark on their expedition accross America:

Captain Clark would take him to a big place somewhere. He would send him to school and teach him things. Meeko would learn to talk like a white boy. He would grow up and have hair on his face. He would look like a white man and try to act like a white man. But he would never be a white man. He was Shoshone.
I would teach Meeko myself. He would learn to run beside a stream all day from dawn until sunset and never stop to take a drink. He would learn to put his hand in boiling water and say that it was cold. He would be a Shoshone always.

Scott O'Dell in Streams to River, River to Sea: A novel of Sacagawea

I remember leaving the hospital -- thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' [We're] just amateurs.

Anne Tyler

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

George Bernard Shaw