# The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting (The School of Life)
* Around children, we abandon our general, mature and dark sense that much that is truly important lies entirely outside our control. (p. 9)
* The natural consequence of over-extended responsibility is guilt. That is why we fear and feel we are not good parents; we blame ourselves because we are haunted by a beautiful, touching, insane idea; that it is wholly in our power to make our children happy. (p. 9)
* Until now, in our own lives, we perhaps thought of love in terms of what another person could give us. Now, having had children, our vision of love is massively reoriented. We start to experience love as the longing simply to make the other happy: to console them in their pains, to ease their difficulties, to rejoice in their existence and to keep them safe from harm. We cry at films we once called sentimental. (p. 11)
* And then you feel this strange thing: your child isn’t very nice to you. They annoy you. You’re losing your temper with the little person you most love in the world and you hate yourself. Yet every kindly adult in the world totally understands. You aren’t bad; you’re just trying to do something very difficult better than any other generation ever has. Authority Nowadays, we can’t simply demand or insist or give an official, parental order – although such strategies worked for most of human history. (p. 14)
* And then you feel this strange thing: your child isn’t very nice to you. They annoy you. You’re losing your temper with the little person you most love in the world and you hate yourself. Yet every kindly adult in the world totally understands. You aren’t bad; you’re just trying to do something very difficult better than any other generation ever has. (p. 14)
* Nowadays, we can’t simply demand or insist or give an official, parental order – although such strategies worked for most of human history. We have to persuade rather than command. This is a deeply kind philosophy. We have renounced authority because we’d rather be loved than feared. We want to enlighten, recommend, reason. (p. 15)
* One of the uses of parenthood is to reconnect us – despite the accumulated layers of complex and disenchanting experience – with our own past innocence. In them, we find again a lost and lovely part of ourselves. (p. 20)
* Strangely, ‘good enough’ is better than perfect, because a child will live the rest of their life in a very imperfect world. We cannot get on if we are dependent on those around us living up to the highest imaginable ideals. (p. 23)
* We are under more pressure to succeed at work and under more pressure to be continually present and focused as parents – at exactly the time when capitalism requires our every last effort. (p. 25)
* We cannot be perfect parents and perfect workers. Something always has to give – and that is not our fault. (p. 25)
* The source of calm is not the mind, but the body. And – most poignantly – we might apply this wisdom not simply to our child but to our partner as well. They (too) may be tired, rather than mean – and hungry rather than horrible, and so in need of quiet murmuring encouragement rather than a careful and highly logical, and no doubt very accurate, analysis of their failings. (p. 31)
* The child is gradually – and with great difficulty – learning the melancholy fact that will take a lifetime to digest: that people are both pleasing and annoying and that many upsetting things are, really, no-one’s fault. (p. 38)
* We create the powerful impression that it’s never OK to feel down, lonely, bereft or gloomy, though these are perfectly natural responses to many normal and trying experiences. Indeed, sadness is often just the appropriate, perceptive, intelligent (and ultimately constructive) response to the sorrows of being human. (p. 42)
* We can teach our children the skills of good suffering. (p. 43)
* Failing one’s children gives them an incentive to go on and achieve things on their own. What a terrifying spectre it would be if we truly were perfect. It would make their own lives directionless and punishing. They should thank us for letting them down; our flaws give them a role and a mission. (p. 49)
* The contortions of adolescence aren’t a picture of how someone will end up. (p. 52)