As a rule, I try to steer clear of opinions pertaining to your parenting. I assume you're doing the best you can, and God bless.
Parenthood always comes as a shock. Postpartum blues? Postpartum panic is more like it. We set out to have a baby; what we get is a total take-over of our lives.
With parenting, like any other skill in life, practice makes perfect.
In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.
Society should see parenting as a public health issue and help parents to bring their children up feeling loved. We have birthing classes, but no parenting classes. The latter is desperately needed if we are to avoid self-destruction.
Whether I'm running, working, relating, parenting, learning - whatever I'm doing, I want to surround myself with people who push me.
I'm hosting weekend retreats all over America. It is like a 24-hour slumber party for moms. We laugh, eat, play games, get massages, win prizes, talk about parenting and even cry a bit.
I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.
I love, love, love being an actor - it's still the hardest and scariest thing I do, outside of parenting. But I've always been someone who likes a busy day.
I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'
Children are our second chance to have a great parent-child relationship.
My dad was not super-intentional in his parenting. He was very self-absorbed. I won't say mean or selfish per se, but very self-absorbed. I think he was just thinking out loud.
Parenting is not for sissies. You have to sacrifice and grow up.
A parentologist is a person who writes a book about parenting that is very clear about answers to, 'How am I supposed to raise my child?' Some of these well-intentioned people may be a bit too sure-footed on the sometimes slippery slope of parenting.
No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.
Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity.
The child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.
The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows.
I'm trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived.
How my parents are in the kitchen is a good indicator of their parenting style. Mum cooks for sustenance, wants to get in and out, the job done quickly. My Dad wants to prance around in the kitchen, create a curry - and a mess - and entertain everyone.