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47bf231
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"I myself," said Gibbon, "am slightly underdone in the personal worthlessness line. It was Papa's fault. He used no irony. The communications mix offered by the parent to the child is as you know twelve percent do this, eighty-two percent don't do that, and six percent huggles and endearments. That is standard. Now, to avoid boring himself or herself to death during this monition the parent enlivens the discourse with wit, usually irony of the cheaper sort. The irony ambigufies the message, but more importantly establishes in the child the sense of personal lack-of-worth. Because the child understands that one who is talked to in this way is not much of a something. Ten years of it goes a long way. Fifteen is better. That is where Pap fell down. He eschewed irony."
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parenting
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Donald Barthelme |
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c66e742
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There was the odd suburban thunderbolt, but they were mostly those people who'd found each other; they were golden and bright-lit and funny. Often they seemed in cahoots somehow, like jailbirds who wouldn't leave; they loved us, they us, and that was a pretty good trick.
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parenting
parents
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Markus Zusak |
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3b341ac
|
I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it.
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mothers
mothers-and-sons
parenting
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a9afe36
|
I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.
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parenting
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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10a17d8
|
Faktum var att han inte kunde vara den sortens pappa langre. Den tiden var forbi. Det var som om Gud plotsligt skulle bestamma sig for att vara Gud igen flera kvadriljoner ar efter att han skapat varlden. Han kunde inte bara dimpa ner fran himlen och saga: A nej, ni borde inte ha placerat Empire State Building dar, och ni borde inte ha ordnat det sa att de afrikanska folken far mindre pengar, och ni borde inte ha latit dem tillverka karnvapen. For da kunde man saga till Honom: Det ar val lite sent att papeka det nu? Var holl du hus medan vi funderade pa de sakerna?
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parenting
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Nick Hornby |
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374819a
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We just want you to be happy. Rand and Marybeth said that all the time, but they never explained how.
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parenting
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Gillian Flynn |
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b8ff7e2
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I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.
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inspirational
parenting
relationships
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James Baldwin |
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35b006d
|
Children's as good as 'rithmetic to set you findin' out things.
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childhood
children
knowledge
learning
motherhood
parenthood
parenting
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Frances Hodgson Burnett |
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a42503e
|
I like uncovering the cultural prejudices I didn't even know.
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biases
conventional-wisdom
education
heritage
parenting
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A.J. Jacobs |
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44defbf
|
My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together-- whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
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glbtq
parenting
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James Baldwin |
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204edfe
|
As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
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education
parenting
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Rebecca Goldstein |
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cdb21be
|
He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky.
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nights
parenting
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Anthony Doerr |
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d89bc8b
|
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 parents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too many people who'd married and abandoned each other for less. The truth of us was always that you were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. Everything else was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all because I was a young man, and not yet clear of my own human vulnerabilities. But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I go down now, I would not go down alone.
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parenting
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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609fca7
|
Maybe we swore we would never be harsh with our children the way others were harsh with us. Then, just when they need us most - when they act up and misbehave and call us names and son on - we get angry and punish them, or feel hurt and block them out. We momentarily forget how fragile our little ones are, just as they forget about cooperation or sharing or calming down and following the rules.
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parent-feelings
parenting
punishment
tantrums
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Lawrence J. Cohen |
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7132078
|
Story telling or teachable moments, provides us with a vast reference base of real life antidotes for possible future problems. They not only entertain and give us a resource of proven solutions, but they also help shape and mold our character. Therefore, when we don't take our time to communicate with our kids, then we rob them of critical life lessons that we and our forefathers learn the hard way - lessons that they would needlessly have to learn through trial and error themselves.
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family-conversations
guidance
life-antidotes
life-lessons
parenting
pep-talk
proven-solutions
real-life
real-talk
storytelling
talking-with-children
teachable-moments
trial-and-error
warnings
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Drexel Deal |
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63e707f
|
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 removed himself to a great distance and encased himself in silence?
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parenting
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Jan Ellison |
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b594783
|
You have to talk to your children about things, a lot of our parents don't do that. You have to explain things to children as to why certain things happen. I think that a good way of improving comprehension is to read the newspaper with your child. A lot of times certain sensational things happen and children want to find out why it happened. And sometimes you would hear them talking to each other passing on erroneous information. Daynette Gardiner, the best School Psychologist in The Bahamas
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erroneous-information
helping-children
improving-comprehension
newspaper
parenting
reading-to-children
right-information
sensational-news
talking
talking-with-children
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Drexel Deal |