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Motherhood Quotes

Browse 1829 quotes about Motherhood.

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Motherhood Quotes

“Self-reflection – based on experiences, principles and goals that we have gathered across our lifetime – allows us to course-correct. This is constantly required as we muddle along, gradually learning better ways for us to parent over time.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“What science and parenting have in common… there is no such thing as ‘best’. We simply cannot be the best parent. It is not possible. Best cannot even be defined. What others may say is best today will change tomorrow to something quite different.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“It is common for new parents to feel guilty when their babies cry. But remember - it is not the parent's fault. The parent's job is to be responsive to their baby, and to help them feel loved and secure.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“Absolute laws of parenting do not exist. Each child is different, in personality, time, age, health and geography. They have different strengths and weaknesses for which we need nuanced responses. There is never one specific word, sentence or response that will always work. There are however, principles of parenting behaviour that we can rely on in most circumstances”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“Childhood is a time of discovery and learning. Play is vitally important for early child development. It allows them to express their creativity and learn to interact with other children. For them it is both work and relaxation. While children love exploring and we must give them enough time to play, many infants and toddlers also find reassurance in repetitive routines, and we need to build this stability into their day.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“Adolescence is a turbulent time of life, and parents are understandably concerned about their children. There is a fine line between wanting to know if your child is in trouble and respecting their privacy.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“If we are struggling at any stage of parenting, think about the atmosphere in the house that we are creating. Is it one of anxiety or anger? Disapproval or judgment? Show your child warmth, support, tolerance, encouragement and praise. Be fair to them, provide them with security, focus on giving them approval and acceptance for their differences. Imagine the atmosphere in the house with this abundance of these things. Your child will feel safe, loved and confident, moving into the world a whole and grounded being.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“To help our kids develop self-compassion, we need to retrain the way they see and speak to themselves - their inner voice. To do this, we might need to retrain our own inner voice, to be gentle with ourselves and accept the parenting decisions we have made. By being kind to ourselves, over time, our children will learn and build on their own self-compassion.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“When babies are very young, their behaviours are automatic and reflex driven. Only at 6-14 weeks old do they begin to become aware of the outside world. New babies are simply not aware of us, and we need to adjust our expectations around their behaviour. In other words, we won’t always be able to stop them crying, or make them calm, or get them to feed well.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“Despite saying that very young babies are primitive, it remains vital that we touch them, hold them, respond to them. One cannot just leave a baby on its own! Interacting with the baby is essential for them, not just in that moment. The development of the baby's senses requires stimulation. Vision will not develop well in the dark. Hearing will not develop in the absence of speaking and singing to them. It definitely matters to them, they just do not know who is touching and holding them.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“Part of not wanting children has always been the certainty that I didn’t have the energy for it, and so I had to make a choice, the choice between children and writing. The first time it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have both, I was still years away from being biologically capable of reproduction. History offers some examples of people who’ve done a good job with children and writing, I know that, but I wasn’t one of those people. I’ve always known my limitations. I lacked the units of energy, and the energy I had, I wanted to spend on my work. To have a child and neglect her in favor of a novel would be cruel, but to simply skip the child in favor of a novel was to avoid harm altogether.”

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Book:These Precious Days: Essays
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“The basics of being a good parent are the same as for being a good human. Arguably, our humanity is foremost about our capacity to stop and assess our behaviour as an individual, as a mother, as a father, as a friend, as a son or a daughter.”

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Book:What Do I Do Now? The basics of parenting babies ... without stress
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“They were complete little people talking to her from a mind she knew nothing about and would have to learn to apprehend; although this person had grown in her body, had torn it emerging, had once shared pulse and food and blood and joy and grief, it was now a separate person whose innards, mind and spirit and emotion, she would never completely comprehend. It was as if one weren't born suddenly, but progressively; as if each birth were also a death, each step they made in development moving them further away from her, from their oneness with her, and in time, far, far from her, they would merge with others, have children themselves, join and separate, until the final separation, which would also be a birth into a new mode.”

ChildrenMotherhood
Book:The Women's Room
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“I knew those were precious times, Mama. I knew they were going by too fast, everybody knows that. Where I went wrong is, I thought that would protect me, the fact that I knew. Knew and appreciated, felt for a minute, and now… I don’t know, something’s going on with time, it’s not passing the way it used to, and I hate it. Because you know it all comes down to is good-bye.”

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Book:Mad Dash
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“It’s disappointing when your child doesn’t agree with you, especially when you know you’re right, but it’s also hugely exciting. Discussing that film defined our differences in a way nothing quite had before, and never so easily or naturally. I loved my daughter even more, if that was possible, for who she was, who I could see her becoming. And I like to think she added a little bit of ballast to her already crowded cargo hold of tolerant affection for Mom.”

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Book:Mad Dash
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“My story with education is that I was mistaken. I used to say and believe for a long period that a single mother could take over the role of both the father and the mother when raising her children but the father. Today, I believe it does not matter which parent is taking over when raising the children. What matters is who is qualified for such a long-loving life commitment. Who can understand the needs of a young girl or an infant boy? Who is willing to continue to learn along the way about those needs of social, psychological, physiological, emotional, behavioral, survival, and materialistic thing? In other words, who is capable of understanding the children's language at each specific age group because they have their language which is different than ours and only those who speak it will succeed to raise them.”

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Book:The Herok
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“Yes, this... Urcheon... speaks the truth. Roegner did swear to give him that which he did not expect. It looks as if our lamented king was an oaf as far as a woman's affairs are concerned, and couldn't be trusted to count to nine. He confessed the truth on his death-bed, because he knew what I'd do to him if he'd admitted it earlier. He knew what a mother, whose child is disposed of so recklessly, is capable of.”

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Book:The Last Wish
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“She peered at the small girl and though it seemed the child wasn’t listening, her grip on Helen loosened, leaving her feeling like a balloon about to soar away, frantic not to be lost into the open sky. Helen pinched her eyes shut as pain washed over her, tightening her body. It was different from other pain she had known. This time, she had a living, breathing someone to fight for, someone waiting on the other side of that agony. Opening her eyes, Helen set her jaw. A child, by their very existence, doesn’t come into a woman’s life without pain. It takes effort. Her fingers squeezed the small girl’s and the child’s chin lifted until their eyes met.”

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Book:The Ocean's Daughter :
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“To be critical of pronatalism is not equivalent to condemning parenthood; it is to shed light on its prescriptive nature and propose that it would be socially and ecologically desirable that parenthood cease to be considered as a natural instinct and/or a religious or a social duty. The ‘biological clock’ that some women claim to hear ticking is also a ‘social clock’ reminding them that whatever else may be going on in their lives, motherhood is their destiny, the road to social acceptance and integration. It is because parenthood is not a natural instinct, but socially and prescriptively imposed, that many people unsuited for family formation bear or adopt children; domestic violence and child abuse result from the often deadly interaction between sexual inequality and pronatalism. Today, pronatalist ideologies and social pressures continue to curtail women’s opportunities and ability to shape their future, and place them in a disadvantaged position relative to men, thus sustaining the inequality between men and women despite considerable gains in sexual liberation, civil rights, and economic opportunities for women.”

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Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“Thinking about adults putting on a happy face for children, or worse, being unable to put on the happy face, is devastating. That we maintain this dishonesty with them, that we must. I have a longing to protect the kids from coming into some consciousness of the fact that taking care of them is difficult. I always imagined that keeping that fact from them was an essential part of good mothering.”

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Book:Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
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“Madeleine describes her difficult decade of trying to write while parenting small kids - which, for many women writers, in particular, resonates powerfully. Freelancer Aleah Marsden told me, "She blessed my desire to pursue something outside of mothering in a way that didn't diminish either calling's importance. Yes, of course, I was to be the best mother I could be to the children entrusted to me. No, they didn't have to be the epicenter of my existence. Yes, my writing was a gift worth protecting and pursuing, and I would be a better human (and mother) for it. No, it didn't give me license to abandon the embodied work that came with the season of mothering young children,”

ChildrenMotherhoodWriters On Writing
Book:A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time
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“For (D.L) Mayfield, "Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship - full of questioning - of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don't think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.”

ChildrenMotherhoodWriters On Writing
Book:A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time
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“Dear Mothers Everywhere! First and foremost - enjoy your children! Rediscover the world with them, as they revel in the mundane and everyday world you've long since taken for granted. Revel in that most mysterious and marvelous thing called maturation. Revel in their infinite capacity to unconditionally trust and love you as no other living thing possibly could. And when you catch yourself taking that for granted, pause. Breathe them in - and revel in the never failing ways your children just keep it -and you - real.”

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Author:Connie Kerbs
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“Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several small items made her cry: a tiny woollen bootie, a broken orthodontic retainer, a woggle from a cub-scout tie. She had not become Malcolm X's private secretary. She never did direct a movie or run for the Senate. She could not fly a plane. But here was all this.”

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Book:On Beauty
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“Better was largely irrelevant when it came to mothering because the entire enterprise relied on the presumption that one day, sooner than you thought, your child would become an entirely self-reliant, independent person who made her own decisions. That child wouldn't necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she'd wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends. It didn't matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child waled off in to the world alone.”

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Book:The Last Romantics
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