Preschool Mothers Day Quotes

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother’s influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children’s needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home—and how apparent when neglected!

In 1970, Alix Kates Shulman, a wife, mother, and writer who had joined the Women's Liberation Movement in New York, wrote a poignant account of how the initial equality and companionship of her marriage had deteriorated once she had children. "[N]ow I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband's life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had." His job became even more demanding, requiring late nights and travel out of town. Meanwhile it was virtually impossible for her to work at home. "I had no time for myself; the children were always there." Neither she nor her husband was happy with the situation, so they did something radical, which received considerable media coverage: they wrote up a marriage agreement... In it they asserted that "each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values and choices... The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside." The agreement insisted that domestic jobs be shared fifty-fifty and, get this girls, "If one party works overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal work by the other." The agreement then listed a complete job breakdown... in other worde, the agreement acknowledged the physical and the emotional/mental work involved in parenting and valued both. At the end of the article, Shulman noted how much happier she and her husband were as a result of the agreement. In the two years after its inception, Shulman wrote three children's books, a biography and a novel. But listen, too, to what it meant to her husband, who was now actually seeing his children every day. After the agreement had been in effect for four months, "our daughter said one day to my husband, 'You know, Daddy, I used to love Mommy more than you, but now I love you both the same.

In every era, the way people raise their children is a window into their conception of human nature. When parents believed in children’s innate depravity, they beat them when they sneezed; when they believed in innate innocence, they banned the game of dodgeball. The other day when I was riding on my bicycle, I was reminded of the latest fashion in human nature when I passed a mother and her two preschoolers strolling on the side of the road. One was fussing and crying, and the other was being admonished by his mother. As I overtook the trio, I heard a stern Mommy voice enunciating one word: “EMPATHY!

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

I try to imagine Zach as a teenager. I remember my mom dealing with me as a teenager and finding me as alien as I might one day find Zach. It seems not that long ago that he was in preschool, and my parents were healthy, and I was healthy, and the neighborhood kids all ran outside to play every evening after dinner, and the only thought I had about the future at all was the sense of Things will be easier, I’ll have more flexibility, more sleep. I never thought about what would be lost. Who knew that a phone call with my mother could bring all this to the surface—that underneath the old mother-daughter frustration was not a wish for her to go away but a longing for her to stay forever? I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles. The day before he said this, I had been told by my eye doctor that I had developed presbyopia, which happens to most people in their forties. As people age, they become farsighted; they have to hold whatever they’re reading or looking at farther away in order to see it clearly. But maybe an emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.

The performance (mothering online) is never for my kids. They’re kids after all and by nature completely self obsessed. I only exist as a background to the foreground of their own experiences. The performance is for me. The performance is for us, who were trained to perform for the male gaze and whose primary value as sex objects no longer holds as much currency. We perform mothering online as a way of accessing meaning when most days the work of motherhood doesn’t seem to mean much according to the many men legislating against family leave, universal preschool, and childcare subsidies.

As you're listening, watch. As your preschooler cries for his beloved plastic blue spoon ("No, Mom, not the yellow one!") or you hear the beginnings of a long night via the static of the baby monitor, look through these windows of grace with the eyes of your heart. See evidence of God's grace to give and sustain life in our fallen world. Believe God is with you in your good work of mothering. I know this is difficult and often painful work. But since "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Rom. 8:18), then let's not fix our eyes on these temporary pains but on Christ. Respond to God's calls to worship throughout your days and nights, serving and nurturing helpless little ones and worshiping the author of life.

One day, Robert came home from preschool and started calling his mother Cleopatra. We thought he’d somehow confused it with Clementine, because both are long and start with the same three letters. But when she asked him why he was calling her that, he grinned and answered, ‘Because you’re my mummy.

In the early 1970s psychologist David Olds was working in a Baltimore day-care center where many of the preschoolers came from homes wracked by poverty, domestic violence, and drug abuse. Aware that only addressing the children’s problems at school was not sufficient to improve their home conditions, he started a home-visitation program in which skilled nurses helped mothers to provide a safe and stimulating environment for their children and, in the process, to imagine a better future for themselves. Twenty years later, the children of the home-visitation mothers

were not only healthier but also less likely to report having been abused or neglected than a similar group whose mothers had not been visited. They also were more likely to have finished school, to have stayed out of jail, and to be working in well-paying jobs. Economists have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs. 37

A Toast to Mother’s Day When my daughter was in preschool she made a mother’s day card for me. The teachers were very good about letting the kids say exactly whatever they wanted on the cards. The children talked and the teacher wrote in the card what they said. My card that year said; Dear Mommy, I hope you have a nice Mother’s Day and if I had a lot of money I would buy you a lot of wine cause I know you like to drink wine. I was mortified by what the teacher must be thinking of me. I was sure everyone thought I was an alcoholic!

...When my nephew was three, [his mother] was worrying about getting him into the right preschool. Kid's fifteen now. He's under pressure to make sure he gets good grades so he can get into a good school. He needs to show good extracurricular activities to get into a good school. He needs to be popular with his classmates. Which means be just like them. Dress right, use the proper slang, listen to proper music, go away on the proper vacations. Live in the right neighborhood, be sure his parents drive the right car, hang with the right group, have the right interests. He has homework. He has soccer practice and guitar lessons. The school decides what he has to learn, and when, and from whom. The school tells him which stairwell he can go up. It tells him how fast to move through the corridors, when he can talk, when he can't, when he can chew gum, when he can have lunch, what he is allowed to wear..." Rita paused and took a drink. "Boy", I said. "Ready for corporate life." She nodded. "And the rest of the world is telling him he's carefree," she said. "And all the time he's worried that the boys will think he's a sissy, and the school bully will beat him up, and the girls will think he's a geek." "Hard times," I said. "The hardest," she said. "And while he's going through puberty and struggling like hell to come to terms with the new person he's becoming, running through it all, like salt in a wound, is the self-satisfied adult smirk that keeps trivializing his angst." "They do learn to read and write and do numbers," I said. "They do. And they do that early. And after that, it's mostly bullshit. And nobody ever consults the kid about it." "You spend time with this kid," I said. "I do my Auntie Mame thing every few weeks. He takes the train in from his hideous suburb. We go to a museum, or shop, or walk around and look at the city. We have dinner. We talk. He spends the night, and I usually drive him back in the morning." "What do you tell him?" I said. "I tell him to hang on," Rita said. She was leaning a little forward now, each hand resting palm-down on the table, her drink growing warm with neglect. "I tell him that life in the hideous suburb is not all the life there is. I tell him it will get better in a few years. I tell him that he'll get out of that stultifying little claustrophobic coffin of a life, and the walls will fall away and he'll have room to move and choose, and if he's tough enough, to have a life of his own making." As she spoke, she was slapping the tabletop softly with her right hand. "If he doesn't explode first," she said. "Your jury summations must be riveting," I said. She laughed and sat back. "I love that kid," she said. "I think about it a lot." "He's lucky to have you. Lot of them have no one." Rita nodded. "Sometimes I want to take him and run," she said. The wind shifted outside, and the rain began to rattle against the big picture window next to us. It collected and ran down, distorting reality and blurring the headlights and taillights and traffic lights and colorful umbrellas and bright raincoats into a kind of Parisian shimmer. "I know," I said.