Marge M. Kennedy Archives - The Behaviour University

[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It didn’t always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It’s known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters’ cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby.

Baby

Memories

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Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl angst over which family they visit at Thanksgiving and which one in December and whether or not it’s best to serve turkey or goose for the family feast. When first faced with the reality that the family you married into does things differently, the warmth of tradition can take on a chill.

Boys

Girl

Reality

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Hard though it may be to accept, remember that guilt is sometimes a friendly internal voice reminding you that you’re messing up.

Friendly

Guilt

Voice

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No matter how children came to be living with just one parent, they need to be told, again and again, that your family’s configuration is the result of an adult decision or an act of fate that has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

Children

Fate

Parent

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One of the silliest lines ever said in a feature film came from Love Story, the 1970s hit, which immortalized the phrase, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” There are few people who would actually want to share a life with someone who held that concept near and dear.

Mean

People

Sorry

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Our kids are not here to comfort us, to entertain us, or to validate us. Those things need to come from ourselves and from other adults.

Adults

Comfort

Kids

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Parents, whether or not we believe in a deity, know that to witness a child’s mind searching for meaning is a miracle.

Believe

Children

Parent

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Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children’s requests, even when unreasonable.

Children

Discipline

Kids

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Too-broad questions, such as, “What’s on your mind?” are apt to be answered “nothing” nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be careful of slipping into “”psycho-speak,” however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you’re reading a script from the latest child-psychology text.

Children

Kids

Reading

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We’ve all got to remember to pick our battles carefully, to be prepared to lose small ones, and to hold out for big ones.

Battle

Lost

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Quotes by Marge M. Kennedy

Marge M. Kennedy

Hard though it may be to accept, remember that guilt is sometimes a friendly internal voice reminding you that you’re messing up.

No matter how children came to be living with just one parent, they need to be told, again and again, that your family’s configuration is the result of an adult decision or an act of fate that has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

One of the silliest lines ever said in a feature film came from Love Story, the 1970s hit, which immortalized the phrase, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” There are few people who would actually want to share a life with someone who held that concept near and dear.

Our kids are not here to comfort us, to entertain us, or to validate us. Those things need to come from ourselves and from other adults.

Parents, whether or not we believe in a deity, know that to witness a child’s mind searching for meaning is a miracle.

Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children’s requests, even when unreasonable.

We’ve all got to remember to pick our battles carefully, to be prepared to lose small ones, and to hold out for big ones.

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