• prolonged sadness, with or without crying

• hopelessness

• feeling helpless to make things better

• irritability

• anxiety

• lack of motivation

• increased anger or hostility

• significant changes in appetite

• insomnia or hypersomnia

• loss of energy

• lack of interest in activities they once enjoyed

• withdrawal from friends and family

• apathetic or pessimistic attitude

• unexplained physical illnesses or pains

• loss of concentration

• difficulty making decisions

• difficulty remembering things

• use of drugs and/or alcohol

• self injury behaviors

• drop in grades at school

• skipping school or cutting classes

• feelings of guilt or shame

• difficulty with relationships

• overreaction to criticism, rejection, or failure

• exceptionally self critical

• problems dealing with authority figures

• preoccupation with death and dying

• writing, drawing, or talking about suicide

• depression

• lying

• acting out behaviors like stealing or running away

• sexually aggressive behaviors

• fear of or excess aggression towards adults

• social withdrawal

• difficulty sleeping; nightmares

• clinging behavior; seperation anxiety

• excessive cooperation or passivity

• regressed behavior like bedwetting

• self injury behaviors

• sudden difficulty walking or sitting

• persistent headaches

• complaints of stomach pains

• injuries inconsistent with explanations or accidents

• bruises, burns or fractures in various states of healing

• unusual interest in genitals

• acting out sexually like promiscuity, public masturbation

• torn, stained, or bloody clothing

• frequent and/or painful urination

• exaggerated startle response

• spending a lot of time "spacing out" or in "fantasy land"

• hypervigilence

• substance abuse

• pregnancy

• direct or indirect disclosure of abuse*

A child is a beam of sunlight from the infinite and eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained. –Lyman Abbott

It takes a village to raise a child. –African proverb

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay. -Brian Aldiss

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. -Maya Angelou

Raising kids is part joy and part guerilla warfare. –Ed Asner

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event. –Gaston Bachelard

Instant availability without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play. -Lotte Bailyn

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. –James Baldwin

It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do, or don't do. –Simone De Beauvoir

We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves. –Henry Ward Beecher

Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child. -Henry Ward Beecher

Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of old age. -Ambrose Bierce

I don't know any parents that look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say, "How can we screw this kid up?" –Russell Bishop

Outings are so much more fun when we can savor them through the children's eyes. -Lawana Blackwell

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. –Allan Bloom

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If, in instructing a child, you are vexed with it for want of adroitness, try, if you have never tried before, to write with your left hand, and then remember that a child is all left hand. -J.F. Boyse

Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life. –John Bradshaw

The only moral lesson which is suited for a child, the most important lesson for every time of life, is this: Never hurt anybody. –Denis Breeze

Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you. –H. Jackson Brown Jr.

But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath! –Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience. -Anatole Broyard

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born. –Pearl S. Buck

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation. -Lois McMaster Bujold

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. -Lois McMaster Bujold

The first duty to children is to make them happy, If you have not made them so, you have wronged them, No other good they may get can make up for that. –Charles Buxton

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either. -Dick Cavett

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers. –Beatrix Campbell

Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves. –Elias Canetti

All kids are gifted; some just open their packages earlier than others. -Michael Carr

If a child is to keep his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. –Rachel Carson

A happy childhood is one of the best gifts that parents have it in their power to bestow. -Mary Cholmondeley

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade. –Chinese proverb

The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them. –Frank Clark

There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child. -Frank Clark

Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation. –C. Everett Coop

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. –Hodding Corter

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much. –Bill Cosby

Raising children is like baking bread; it has to be a slow process or you will end up with an overdone crust and an underdone interior. -Marcelene Cox

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires. –Marcelene Cox

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. -Quentin Crisp

Kids spell love T-I-M-E. -John Crudele

If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent. –Bette Davis

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove, but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child. –Kathy Davis

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say - for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time - but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given. –Midge Decter

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home. -Phyllis Diller

Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built. –James C. Dobson

Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations. –James C. Dobson

The soul is healed by being with children. - Fyodor Dostoyevski

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world. –Isadora Duncan

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much. –Marian Wright Edelman

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out. –Marian Wright Edelman

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open. -Harry Edwards

A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person. –Barbara Ehrenreich

Children are a poor man's riches. - English proverb

You must not expect old heads upon young shoulders. –English proverb

For what constitutes a child? Ignorance. What constitutes a child? Want of instruction; for they are our equals so far as their degree of knowledge permits. -Epictetus

Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them. –Richard Evans

Any child can tell you that the sole purpose of a middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble. –Dennis Fakes

Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves. –Francois FTNelon

To nourish and raise children against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons. –Marilyn French

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them. –Sigmund Freud

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding. -Edgar Friedenberg

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it. –Margaret Fuller

There are two great injustices that can befall a child. One is to punish him for something he didn't do. The other is to let him get away with doing something he knows is wrong. –Robert Gardner

How many hopes and fears, how many ardent wishes and anxious apprehensions are twisted together in the threads that connect the parent with the child! –Samuel Goodrich

In the life of children there are two very clear cut phases - before and after puberty. Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work: after puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious, tyrannical, insufferable. Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late: then of course the stick and violence enter the scene and yield very few results indeed. Why not instead take an interest in the child during the first period? –Antonio Gramsci

Alas!regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today. –Thomas Gray

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. –Graham Greene

There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. –Graham Greene

A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone. –Jane Harrison

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world. –Shirley Hazzard

Children are our most valuable natural resource. –Herbert Hoover

Each child is an adventure into a better life - an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new. –Hubert Humphrey

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. -Randall Jarrell

We’ve made houses for hatred. It’s time we made a place where people’s souls may be seen and made safe. Be careful with each other, these fragile flames, for innocence can’t be lost, it just needs to be maintained. -Jewel

Parents are traffic signs that are always in our blind spots. –Jeremy Johnson

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what motive can make a father cruel? - Samuel Johnson

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. -Franklin P. Jones

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next. –Franklin P. Jones

Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. –June Jordon

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted. –Garrison Keillor

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze. –Garrison Keillor

Whenever I held my newborn baby in my arms, I used to think that what I said and did to him could have an influence not only on him but on all whom he met, not only for a day or a month or a year, but for all eternity - a very challenging and exciting thought for a mother. -Rose Kennedy

For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. –Ellen Key

Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. –Rudyard Kipling

We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them. –Jess Lair

What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own. –Doug Larson

I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult. -Fran Lebowitz

The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard. –John Lennon

Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall. –Max Lerner

Insanity is hereditary, you get it from you children. -Sam Levenson

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy. -Sam Levenson

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist. -Michael Levine

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain. –John Locke

Ah! what would the world be to us if the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us worse than the dark before. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Level with your child by being honest. Nobody spots a phony quicker than a child. -Mary MacCracken

Parents can plant magic in a child's mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit. –Robert Macneil

As adults, we must ask more of our children than they know how to ask of themselves. What can we do to foster their open-hearted hopefulness, engage their need to collaborate, be an incentive to utilize their natural competency and compassion...show them ways they can connect, reach out, weave themselves into the web of relationships that is called community? –Dawna Markova

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them. –Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent. –Don Marquis

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself. -Joyce Maynard

Oh, high is the price of parenthood, and daughters may cost you double. You dare not forget, as you thought you could, that youth is a plague and a trouble. –Phyllis Mcginley

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today. –Margaret Mead

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation. -Margaret Mead

What is done to children, they will do to society. –Karl A. Menninger

A little less worry over the child and a bit more concern about the world we make for the child to live in. –Adolph Meyer

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men. –Maria Montessori

The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder. –Jim Morrison

Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him. –Clark Moustakas

Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore. -Ogden Nash

Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better? –Jane Nelson

Perhaps parents would enjoy their children more if they stopped to realize that the film on childhood can never be run through for a second showing. -Evelyn Nown

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much. –Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going. –P.J. O’Rourke

If children are to be good, using the term in its broadest sense, it is necessary for the parents to grow with the children. -Jacob Panken

When I approach a child he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is and respect for what he may become. –Louis Pasteur

The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent. -Frank Pittman

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness. –J.B. Priestley

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance. –Adrienne Rich

Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections. –John Ruskin

Speaking personally, I have found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other that I have experienced. -Bertrand Russell

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. –George Santayana

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible - the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nuturing family. -Virginia Satir

In all our efforts to provide advantages we have actually produced the busiest, most competitive, highly pressured, and over-organized generation of youngsters in our history. –Eda J. Le Shan

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date. –George Bernard Shaw

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy. –George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. –George Bernard Shaw

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. –George Bernard Shaw

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. –George Bernard Shaw

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example. –George Bernard Shaw

There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst. -George Bernard Shaw

In raising my children, I have lost my mind but found my soul. -Lisa T. Shepherd

The family seems to have two predominant functions: to provide warmth and love in time of need and to drive each other insane. -Donald G. Smith

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mother and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all. –Benjamin Spock

There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it - benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their good subjects and punishment to their bad ones, who are amused at the cleverness of children and annoyed by their stupidities. –Viola Spolin

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body. –Elizabeth Stone

Children act in the village as they have learned at home. –Swedish proverb

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children. -Charles R. Swindoll

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults. -Thomas Szasz

We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we often forget that they are someone today. -Stacia Tauscher

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings. -Brian Tracy

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. -Harry S Truman

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. –John Updike

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you. -Peter De Vries

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones. - Peter De Vries

Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision. –Denis Waitley

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. –John Whitehead

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation. –Ray Wilbur

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. -Oscar Wilde

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. –Oscar Wilde

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. -Oscar Wilde

Children are happy because they don't yet have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong." They don't have a mind-set that puts "Things to Fear" before "Things to Love." -Marianne Williamson

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard. -Sloan Wilson

There are no "illegitimate children" only illegitimate parents. -Leon Yankwich

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world. –Zig Ziglar