Quotes & Mantras to Keep You Going

Children need our compassion the most when they seem to deserve it the least.

Children do well if they can.

Children act to meet their needs.

Children are just doing the best they can with the feelings they have at the time.

Helping children remember their goodness is the greatest gift we can give them. (Tara Brach)

Everyone wants to be the good guy; no one wants to be the bad guy.

We can put our children in the role of helper, rather than culprit.

It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how he wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.

— Thomas Gordon

It is paradoxical but true that parents lose influence by using power and will have more influence on their children by giving up their power or refusing to use it.

— Thomas Gordon

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

— Victor Frankl

Forgiven, forgiven. (To help move past guilt, put your hand over your heart and offer yourself compassion for what you have said or done to your child.)

—adapted from Tara Brach

I have come to the realization that being a parent is much harder than society allows us to acknowledge.

— Rachel Macy Stafford

The secret work of parenthood is that we are all still growing up, and parenting forces us to learn to parent ourselves as well as our child. . . You deserve all the tenderness you would shower on a newborn baby. Giving that love to ourselves transforms our parenting and our lives.

— Laura Markham