100 Positive Parenting Quotes About Raising Children
Inside you’ll find a huge list of positive parenting quotes that will inspire you to be the best parent for your children that you can be.
Whether you’re raising a toddler or a teen — or any age in between — parenting is can be a challenge.
You question yourself constantly, wondering if you’re making the right choices.
Kids don’t come with instructions. So how are you supposed to know what you’re doing?
Here’s a little secret — you don’t.
Very few of us do…
The majority of us are just winging it and doing the best we can.
And at the end of the day we all just want to raise a good kid, who is kind, strong and resilient.
But how exactly do we do that?
The good thing is that we can turn to friends, family, and experts when we need input on a particular topic.
Of course, we should always trust our own instincts, first and foremost. But, it doesn’t hurt to gather wisdom or a fresh perspective when needed.
One thing we know for sure — positive parenting works. That might look different for different families, but as a general rule of thumb, when people feel better they do better.
The way you talk to your kids eventually becomes their inner voice.
Choosing to discipline with the goal of teaching your kids to do better, rather than punishing them for their mistakes, is one way you can practice positive parenting in your home.
Really, the biggest thing is to lead by example. Talk to them the way you want them to talk to you and others. Model what it looks like to say sorry when you mess up. When in doubt, choose grace.
If you need a little encouragement on your positive parenting journey, look no further.
Today we are sharing the best positive parenting quotes that will inspire and encourage you to become a more patient and impactful parent.
Inspiring Positive Parenting Quotes You’ll Love
1. “Your words as a parent have great power. Use them wisely and make sure they come from the heart.” — Carolina King
2. “To be in your children’s memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today.” — Barbara Johnson
3. “Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.” — Anna Quindlen
4. “If you want your children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.” — Abigail Van Buren
5. “Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” — Brooke Hampton
6. “We’re all imperfect parents and that’s perfectly okay. Tiny humans need connection not perfection.” —L. R. Knost
7. “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?” — Jane Nelson
8. “The most powerful way to change the world is to live in front of our children the way we would like the world to be.” — Graham White
9. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” — Margaret Mead
10. “By loving them for more than their abilities, we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments.” — Eileen Kennedy-Moore
11. “Too much love never spoils our children. Children become spoiled when we substitute presents for presence.” — Anthony Withman
12. “If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding….and snap an opportunity to shape up character.” — Jane Clayson Johnson
13. “Adults who are respectful of children are not just modeling a skill or behavior, they are meeting the emotional needs of those children, thereby helping to create the psychological conditions for children to treat others respectfully.” — Alfie Kohn
14. “So often, children are punished for being human. They are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes. Yet, we adults have them all the time. None of us are perfect. We must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves.” — Rebecca Eanes
15. “Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” — Rumi
16. “No matter the problem, kindness is always the right response.” — L.R. Knost
17. “It is the nature of the child to be dependent, and it is the nature of dependence to be outgrown. Begrudging dependency because it is not independence is like begrudging winter because it is not spring. Dependency blossoms into independence in its own time.” — Peggy O’Mara
18. “Every day in a hundred small ways our children ask us, ‘Do you see me? Do you hear me? Do I matter?’ This behavior often reflects our response.” — L.R. Knost
19. “Trust children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we should not be trusted.” — John Holt
Related: How to Raise a Grateful Child [12 Practical Parenting Tips]
20. “Release your attachment to how things ‘ought’ to be and instead to surrender to how they actually are.” — Dr. Shefali Tsabary
21. “The world is changed by examples, not by opinions.” — Paulo Coehlo
22. “Pushing children into something when they’re not ready only pushes them away. Let them know that waiting and observing is an option. Doing something when they are comfortable and ready is perfectly acceptable. It develops self-awareness and self-respect.” — Kristy Lee
23. “Don’t tell your kids, ‘I’m proud of you.’ Tell them, ‘You should be proud of yourself.’” — Kristen Welch
24. “To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is.” — Fred Rogers
25. “I wish children could grow according to their natural pace: sleep when sleepy, wake up when rested, eat when hungry, cry when upset, play and explore without being unnecessarily interrupted. In other words, be allowed to grow and blossom as each was meant to.” — Magda Gerber
26. “Nothing that grieves us can be called little. By the eternal law of proportions, a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of his crown are events of the same size.” — Mark Twain
27. “Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow.” — Thomas Bray
28. “A child seldom needs a good talking to as much as a good listening to.” — Robert Brault
29. “Behind every young child who believes in himself is a parent who believed first.” — Matthew L. Jacobson
30. “Feeling heard and understood allows children to release the feelings, let go, and move on.” — Janet Lansbury
31. “You must first teach a child he is loved. Only then is he ready to learn everything else.” — Amanda Morgan
32. “Counteract conflict by connection and communicating calmly.” — Kristy Lee
33. “Being a mom means choosing to show up day after day and love day after day and give day after day and try day after day and not having all the answers and not being perfect but simply doing your best.” — Rachel Martin
34. “Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.” — Alfie Kohn
35. “Peaceful parenting is simply treating our tiny humans with the same humanity that we like to be treated with ourselves.” — L.R. Knost
36. “Every day our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. We should tread softly.” — Sir Ken Robinson
37. “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
38. “I’m always amazed when adults say that children ‘just did that to get attention’. Naturally children who need attention will do all kinds of things to get it. Why not just give it to them?” — Lawrence J. Cohen
39. “If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.” — Ignacio Estrada
40. “Children do not need us to shape them; they need us to respond to who they are.” — Naomi Aldort
Related: Enjoying Motherhood [How to Love Being a Mom When it’s Hard]
41. “Children do well if they can. If they can’t, we need to figure out why so we can help.” — Ross Greene
42. It’s time we stop buying the lie that we need to be hard on kids because ‘the world is hard’. Love them as hard as you can. That’s what they need.” — Tara Vogler
43. “Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.” — Catherine M. Wallace
44. “There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you’d be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.” — Ayelet Waldman
45. “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
46. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
47. “Motherhood has taught me the meaning of living in the moment and being at peace. Children don’t think about yesterday, and they don’t think about tomorrow. They just exist in the moment.” — Jessalyn Gilsig
48. “Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice.” — Charles F. Kettering
49. “Being a mother is not about what you gave up to have a child, but what you’ve gained from having one.” — Jill Churchill
50. “By making eye contact, getting down to your child’s level, offering a touch, or using a tone of your voice that conveys a desire to genuinely connect, you disarm yourself. You make it possible to reach your child more deeply and truly move forward together.” — Hilary Flowers
51. “Kids raised from birth on to feel safe expressing their emotions, who feel their parents are on their side, aren’t perfect. They’re easier to parent, though, because they’re better at managing their emotions, and therefore their behavior. They’re more willing to accept our guidance.” — Laura Markham
52. “We all need someone who understands.” — Magda Gerber
53. “There’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.” — Jill Churchill
54. “At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child’s success is the positive involvement of parents.” — Jane D. Hull
55. “Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” — Riney Jordan
56. “Nurturing never happens in a rush.” — Emma Scheib
57. “Children should not be burdened with making us happy, nor blamed for making us sad or angry. Children are not responsible for how we feel. We are.” — Larissa Dan
58. “The best security blanket a child can have is parents who respect each other.” — Janet Blaustone
59. “A lot of parents will do anything for their kids except let them be themselves.” — Banksy
60. “There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.” — Marianne Williamson
Related: 101 Powerful Affirmations for Kids to Build Confidence and Self-Control
61. “If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money.” — Abigail Van Buren
62. “You’re always going to wonder if you’re doing things wrong. But that’s what it means to be a mom, to care so much about someone else that you just want to be as perfect as possible.” — Naya Rivera
63. “A good father is one of the most unsung, unpraised, unnoticed, and yet one of the most valuable assets in our society.” — Billy Graham
64. “Play is the language of childhood. Speaking our children’s language may sound like nonsense to us, but it sounds like love to them.” — L.R. Knost
65. “How do we communicate worthiness to our children? Only through our presence. Our full-on, engaged, attuned presence.” — Dr. Shefali Tsabary
66. “I wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred.” — Brene Brown
67. “Each day of our lives we make deposits into the memory banks of our children.” — Charles R. Swindoll
68. “Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.” — Walt Disney
69. “I looked on child-rearing not only as a work of love and duty, but as a profession that was fully interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.” — Rose Kennedy
70. “One day, your child will make a mistake or a bad choice and run to you instead of away form you and in that moment you will know the immense value of peaceful, positive, respectful parenting.” — L.R. Knost
71. “Childhood is fleeting, so let kids be kids and cherish the time you have together.” — Abraham Lincoln
72. “Train up a child in the way he should go – but be sure you go that way yourself.” — Charles Spurgeon
73. “I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.” — Mitch Albom
74. “Provide plenty of love balanced by structure and discipline.” — Barack Obama
75. “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.” — W.E.B. DuBois
76. “The greatest happiness is family happiness.” — Joyce Brothers
77. “Remember that the most important thing is not your child’s behavior. The most important thing is your child. Look beyond behavior and connect with your child.” — Issa Waters
78. “The golden rule of parenting is to always show your children the kind of person you want them to be.” — Elizabeth Roxas
79. “I have found the very best way to advise your children is to find out what they want to do and advise them to do it.” — Harry S. Truman
80. “Parenting shifts as your kid shifts. The best thing for me has been throwing any kind of parenting manual out the window.” — Kate Hudson
Related: How to be a Happy Mom; 13 Real-Life Strategies that Work
81. “At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.” — Barbara Bush
82. “I think it’s necessary to let kids be bored once in a while. That’s how they learn to be creative.” — Kim Raver
83. “They say that parenting is like dancing. You take one step, your child takes another.” — Michael Jackson
84. “No matter how busy you are, carve out time to play with your kids.” — Theodore Roosevelt
85. “Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.” — Carl Jung
86. “Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” — Anne Frank
87. “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.” — Oscar Wilde
88. “When a man dies, if he can pass enthusiasm along to his children, he has left them an estate of incalculable value.” — Thomas Edison
89. “It is time for parents to teach young people that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” — Maya Angelou
90. “Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not spend your whole time trying to correct them.” — Bill Ayers
91. “I think a lot about teaching my kids to work hard. I’ve learned something about kids — they don’t do what you say; they do what you do.” — Jennifer Lopez
92. “The best kind of parent you can be is to lead by example.” — Drew Barrymore
93. “When someone else’s happiness is your happiness, that is love.” — Lana Del Rey
94. “Be the person you want your child to be.” — Betsy Brown
95. “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but have never failed to imitate them.” — James Baldwin
96. “Every home is a university and the parents are the teachers.” — Mahatma Gandhi
97. “Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.” — Maria Montessori
98. “Parents are not perfect, nor are they saints. Dads and moms make mistakes all the time. How you handle these situations will be an important life lesson for your children.” — Bethany Bridges
99. “At the end of the day, my most important job is still mom-in-chief.” — Michelle Obama
100. “To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.” — Dr. Seuss
More Inspirational Parenting Quotes:
Conclusion:
There is no such thing as a perfect parent, but we can all commit to small improvements every day.
As we become more calm and patient with our children, they will do the same with us. This will have a huge impact on your family dynamic over the years and will result in the creation of a strong bond with your children that will stand the test of time.
