I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Many believe that parenting is about controlling children's behavior and training them to act like adults. I believe that parenting is about controlling my own behavior and acting like an adult myself. Children learn what they live and live what they learn.

If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do.

It takes a near act of rebellion for even a four-year-old to break away from society's expectations.

The lesson applies as well to the politics of family as country. The parent who grants privileges or enforces rules erratically invites rebelliousness by unwittingly establishing freedoms for the child. The parent who only sometimes prohibits between-meal sweets may create for the child the freedom to have such snacks. At that point, enforcing the rule becomes a much more difficult and explosive matter because the child is no longer merely lacking a never-possessed right but is losing an established one.

Challenging boundaries is not simply social rebellion. It is the catalyst of social evolution. When systems go unchallenged, they grow complacent and corrupt. Raising generation after generation of rule followers and conformists may be more convenient for society, but it inevitably leads to tyranny and, ultimately, revolution. Raising independent thinkers, conscious objectors, and peaceful activists creates a social balance that can endure. Peaceful parenting, then, by its very nature, is socially responsible because it creates the catalysts of social evolution that protect our society from the complacency and corruption that lead to tyranny and revolution.

Parents who tell their offspring that sex is an act performed only for procreation do everyone a serious disservice.

It's important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.

In a real sense, all of us are “the parents” of all young children - because we help shape the culture and determine its values.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.

Wars are waged by people
who were parented by someone.
Crimes are committed by people
who were parented by someone.
Brutality is inflicted by people
who were parented by someone.
Nations are led by people
who were parented by someone.
Hope, help, and healing are all
shared by people who were
parented by someone.
We, the parents of today, are
that someone for our children,
and our children will one day be
that someone for their children.
We may not be able to eliminate
all war, end all crime, or stop all
brutality, but sowing peace,
kindness, compassion, and
empathy into our children
is the single most powerful
way we can each be someone who
changes the world for the better.

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children ourweigh our fears

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears and anger: 'Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I've warmed for you over the woodstove? It's so cosy.' Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants Safety is not what it wants.