{"author":"Jennifer Senior","author_id":"Jennifer+Senior","total_quotes":22,"quotes":[{"text":"Couples with children may argue more, the author suggests, because children are a reminder of just how crucial our choices are.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["disagreement","stress","worry"],"id":5164,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["entitlement","family","parenthood"],"id":53652,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["discipleship","leadership","maturation","parenthood"],"id":64906,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"What makes a mother? Looking at your child and identifying emotion.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["discipleship","empathy","maturation","mentoring","parenting"],"id":71081,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"Children live life as a controlled experiment.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["curiosity","openness","wonder"],"id":73655,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["diction","optimism","tone","word-choice","worship"],"id":86532,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the 'experiencing self' versus the 'remembering self.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["children","memories","memory","parenting","remembering"],"id":123445,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["parenthood","preparation"],"id":139128,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, 'There is no folk wisdom.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["assumptions","culture","heritage"],"id":154670,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"},{"text":"And if that's the case -- if we are our remembering selves -- then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. 'You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected,' says McAdams. 'And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.","author":"Jennifer Senior","tags":["children","meaningfulness","memory","parenting"],"id":183264,"author_id":"Jennifer+Senior"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":22,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}