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"I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad."
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"There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal."

"When you discipline a child you prepare them for a responsible and accountable adulthood."

"Motherhood isn't just about making babies, it's about making lives and molding destinies."

"If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away."

"We pretend that we know our children, because it's easier than admitting the truth--from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers. It's far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it's safer to say you're a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you."

"Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived."

"What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?"

"Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out."
Explore more quotes by P. J. O'Rourke

"Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us."

"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."

"Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy."

"Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there."

"Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper."

"I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived."

"I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid."
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