Children Growing Up Quotes

1. "Almost 24 million children - one in three - are likely growing up without their father involved in their lives."
Author: Arne Duncan

2. "When you have a child, you start to dream of how this kid will grow up and make you proud. The only thing you can predict with 100% certainty is that the reality will diverge somehow from that dream. Some of our children will disappoint us by not being the scholars we hoped they would be. Some children will disappoint us by not being the athletes we hoped they would be. Some will disappoint us by coming out and telling us they are gay and they won't give us grandchildren...the real question is not, what book can I read, what technique can I use to raise a perfect child? The real question is how will you handle that gap between the child you dreamt of having and the real child growing up in your home...What I have learned is that any religion, if you do it wrong, will leave people feeling condemned and dismissed and unworthy and any religion, if you do it right, will leave people feeling cleansed and firmed. (118) Rabbi Harold Kushner"
Author: Carol Lynn Pearson

3. "...[their] children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up."
Author: Charles Dickens

4. "The most serious injury is done in childhood. Our cruel waste of the nerve force of children is only more pathetic than it is absurd. The mere business of growing up... which should be a process unconscious or full of joy and rich accumulation, is made by our ignorant mishandling a confusing, irritating, exhausting process, often leaving permanent injuries to the machine, as well as waste of power."
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

5. "I wondered if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent's secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was supposed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available. Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my own was the right order of things."
Author: Deb Caletti

6. "In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet."
Author: Elizabeth Hardwick

7. "Change is the nature of life, Cassidy. Some of it's good, like new babies being born and children growing up and leaving home and all the new adventures that both of those things bring. And sometimes change is more difficult - like when your dad died. But it's nothing to fear. Good or bad, when we rise up to meet it, change can make us stronger. It's what moved us farther along down the road ahead."
Author: Heather Vogel Frederick

8. "People know more about baseball players' contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children's lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, 'Do you want to bring a child into this world?' That's pretty dire."
Author: Jackson Browne

9. "I belonged to Stratford Children's Theater when I was a boy growing up in Manchester. Even then, I was always doing character parts."
Author: John Mahoney

10. "Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood??establishing independence and intimacy??burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma."
Author: Judith Lewis Herman

11. "If I wasn't acting, I would probably be working with children. I was a camp counselor growing up and I loved it."
Author: Julianne Nicholson

12. "If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it."
Author: Ken Hollings

13. "We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)"
Author: Kristina Riggle

14. "We're so preoccupied with protecting children from disappointment and discomfort that we're inadvertently excusing them from growing up."
Author: LZ Granderson

15. "We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

16. "Children are a burden to a mother, but not the way a heavy box is to a mule. Our children weight hard on my heart, and thinking about them growing up honest and healthy, or just living to grow up at all, makes a load in my chest that is bigger than the safe at the bank,and more valuable to me than all the gold inside it."
Author: Nancy E. Turner

17. "We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children."
Author: Randy Alcorn

18. "If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can't imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America's alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings."
Author: Rita Dove

19. "Absolutely the worst thing about this job is the travel and being away from family. I have a wife and three wonderful children, the kids are all active in sports and it's very difficult to up and leave and miss them growing up."
Author: Roy Clark

20. "Top 10 Deathbed Regrets:1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life other people expected of me.2. I wish I took time to be with my children more when they were growing up.3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings, without the fear of being rejected or unpopular.4. I wish I would have stayed in touch with friends and family.5. I wish I would have forgiven someone when I had the chance.6. I wish I would have told the people I loved the most how important they are to me.7. I wish I would have had more confidence and tried more things, instead of being afraid of looking like a fool.8. I wish I would have done more to make an impact in this world.9. I wish I would have experienced more, instead of settling for a boring life filled with routine, mediocrity and apathy.10. I wish I would have pursued my talents and gifts.(contributed by Shannon L. Alder, author and therapist that has 17 years of experience working with hospice patients)"
Author: Shannon L. Alder

21. "You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it."
Author: Stephen King

22. "I think the arts are very important for children growing up."
Author: Stephen Schwartz

23. "They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions."
Author: Virginia Woolf

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