The Kitchen Sink: CRUSTY SAYINGS

With apologies to whomever may have said this before the source cited:

It takes a child to make a man out of a boy. P.H.Harrison,Jr. 

Crusty Sayings collected by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For permission to use or to correct a source contact randmxcentric@gmail.com

Parenting: POOR PARENTING CAN TEACH GOOD PARENTING

As I was growing up there was one thing my parents tried to practice with me that I vowed never to do to my kids. Raised by authoritarian parents themselves in the early 1900s, they felt entitled to immediate, unquestioning obedience “because I'm your mother,” or “Because I said so,” or “ No back-talk from you, young lady!”  When I was caught smoking at age 14, my chain-smoking father chastised me:”Do as I say, not as I do,” and he meant it. Hmmmm - what’s a kid learn from that?

I have always had a strong need to understand and personalize what I am expected to do and why. This enables me to take full responsibility for my actions. I felt these parental pronouncements to be very disrespectful so they provoked more questions and usually led to arguments, sometimes punishments.