Inspirational quotes, insights and poems for parents

Sometimes the poorest man, leaves his children the richest inheritance.
– Ruth E. Renkel

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
– Victor Hugo

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
– Thomas Paine

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
– Mark Twain

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
– Malcolm X

Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
– Nelson Mandela

I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
– Albert Einstein

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
– Plato, The Republic

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
– William Arthur Ward

Children become what they are told they are
– Dorothy DeLay, world famous violin teacher

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Only with the heart can one see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The moment where you doubt you can fly, you cease for ever being able to do it.
– J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
– Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

It is easier to build up a child than it is to repair an adult. Choose your words wisely.
– Unknown

Wise parents prepare their children to get along without them. They provide opportunities for growth as children acquire the spiritual maturity to exercise their agency properly. And yes, this means children will sometimes make mistakes and learn from them.
– Elder Larry Y. Wilson

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
– Benjamin Franklin

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.
– Hodding Carter

If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.
– Abigail Van Buren, aka Dear Abby, American advice columnist and radio show host

Your children need your presence more than your presents.
– Jesse Jackson

It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
– Joyce Maynard

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while.
– Josh Billings

When you have brought up kids, there are memories you store directly in your tear ducts.
– Robert Brault

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
– Anonymous

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
– Albert Einstein

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
– George Bernard Shaw

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
– C.S. Lewis

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

Any kid will run any errand for you if you ask at bedtime.
– Red Skelton

The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.
– Joe Houldsworth

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
– Stacia Tauscher

Children are one third of our population and all of our future.
– Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

Children make your life important.
– Erma Bombeck

All kids need is a little help, a little hope and someone who believes in them.
– Magic Johnson

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
– Jane Yolen

I inherited that calm from my father, who was a farmer. You sow, you wait for good or bad weather, you harvest, but working is something you always need to do.
– Miguel Indurain

Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It’s about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.
– Ron Taffel

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
– Franklin P. Jones

The soul is healed by being with children.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A mother understands what a child does not say.
– Jewish Proverb

Infant Sorrow
My mother groan’d! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
– William Blake

Hugs can do great amounts of good, especially for children.
– Diana, Princess of Wales

A person’s a person, no matter how small.
– Dr. Seuss, author

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.
– Nelson Mandela

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.
– Angela Schwindt

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
– Pablo Casals

We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.
– Henry Ward Beecher

My heroes are and were my parents. I can’t see having anyone else as my heroes.
– Michael Jordan

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.
– Emilie Buchwald

He who teaches children learns more than they do.
– German proverb

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
– Oscar Wilde

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.
– Carl Sandburg

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
– C.S. Lewis

To be in your children’s memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today.
– Anonymous

Parents need to fill a child’s bucket of self-esteem so high that the rest of the world can’t poke enough holes to drain it dry.
– Alvin Price

One generation full of deeply loving parents would change the brain of the next generation, and with that, the world.
– Dr. Charles Raison

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
– Plato

It’s not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.
– Ann Landers

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
– Neil Postman

Children are a great comfort in your old age – and they help you reach it faster, too.
– Lionel Kauffman

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.
– John Wilmot

Parents who are afraid to put their foot down usually have children who step on their toes.
– Chinese Proverb

The only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants.
– Johnny Depp

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so they have very little time with their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world.
– Mother Theresa

Parenthood: It’s about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.
-Peter Krause

It’s impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.
-Nicholas Sparks

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did – that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that – a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.
-Debra Ginsberg

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
– Haim Ginott

If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them and half as much money.
– Abigail Van Buren

If I had my had my child to raise over again
I’d build self-esteem first and the house later
I’d finger paint more and point the finger less
I would do less correcting and more connecting
I’d take my eyes off my watch and watch with my eyes
I would care to know less and know to care more
I’d take more hikes and fly more kites
I’d stop playing serious and seriously play
I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars
I’d do more hugging and less tugging
I’d see the oak tree in the acorn more often
I would be firm less often and affirm much more
I’d model less about the love of power
And more about the power of love
-Diane Loomans

What Did I Do Today?
What did I do today?
Today I left some dishes dirty,
The bed got made around 3:30.
The diapers soaked a little longer,
The odour grew a little stronger.
The crumbs I spilled the day before,
Are staring at me from the floor.
The fingerprints there on the wall,
Will likely be there still next fall.
The dirty streaks on those window panes,
Will still be there next time it rains.
Shame on you, you sit and say,
Just what did you do today?
I nursed a baby till he slept,
I held a toddler while she wept.
I played a game of hide and seek,
I squeezed a toy so it would squeak.
I pulled a wagon, sang a song,
Taught a child right from wrong.
What did I do this whole day through?
Not much that shows, I guess that’s true.
Unless you think that what I’ve done,
Might be important to someone,
With bright brown eyes and soft brown hair,
If that is true…I’ve done my share.
Author Unknown