500+ Selfish Parents Quotes for Inspiration and Reflection

Selfish Parents Quotes: Parenting can be one of the toughest jobs in the world, requiring a lot of sacrifice, patience, and selflessness. Unfortunately, some parents can be selfish which can have an adverse effect on their children’s growth and development. If this has happened to you personally, know that you are not alone. To help inspire you with our list of 500+ selfish parent quotes – there will always be someone out there with similar struggles!

Parents who prioritize their own needs over those of their children can create a range of issues. Selfish parenting may lead to low self-esteem, feelings neglected, and trust issues among children. Therefore, it’s essential for parents to recognize the signs of selfish parenting and strive towards becoming more selfless for the sake of their well-being.

These Selfish Parents Quotes from selfish parents offer insight and motivation for both parents and children alike. Whether you’re a parent struggling with selfish tendencies or dealing with the effects of selfish parenting, these Selfish Parents Quotes provide perspective and motivation.

Some Selfish Parents Quotes on selfish parenting will remind you of the value of being present for your children and prioritizing their needs over your own. Other Selfish Parents Quotes illuminate the long-term consequences of selfish parenting and its detrimental effects on children’s emotional and mental well-being.

Selfish Parents Quotes

• Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them. – Bill Ayers
• You shouldn’t do that. Not to your child. You should carry your own burdens. – Cassandra Clare
• Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up. – Jonathan Anthony Burkett
• Good parenting give headaches, but bad parenting gives heartaches. – Shiv Khera
• If you teach hatred to your children, one day your child will have that hatred reflected back onto them and onto YOU. – Suzy Kassem
• To all you parents out there, don’t make your little girls, or little boys, so thirsty for love that they will want to drink water that will poison them. – Lisa Bedrick
• If mental abuse was a punishable crime, a lot of parents would be in jail serving a long term. – Maddy Malhotra

Selfish Quotes

• Parents. Honestly. Sometimes they really do think the world revolves around them. – Randa Abdel-Fattah
• If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much. – Jackie Kennedy
• Many children of toxic parents find it exceptionally difficult to identify who they are once they grow up. – JR Thorpe

• In troubled families, abuse and neglect are permitted. It’s talking about them that is forbidden. – Marcia Sirota
• I built up so much hatred for my parents, like so much anger for the life they had given me. – Tana Mongeau
• No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. – Jeannette Walls
• Remember, you are not managing an inconvenience; You are raising a human being. – Kittie Frantz
• The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. Clarence Darrow
• They should love you, just as you are. Parents should love their kids, right?You’d think so. – N.R. Walker
• In the minds of my parents, they are the victims; I am the abuser. – Christina Enevoldsen
• Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it. – Russell Baker
• Fear-based parenting is the surest way to create intimidated children. – Tim Kimmel
• Narcissist parents don’t care about their children’s feelings at all. Only their feelings matter. -Kim Saeed
• What’s so sad is when we’re younger, if you have a bad parent, that is normal to you, and that’s what you think of as healthy. – Jennifer Lawrence
• Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’ – yours. Robert Ballard
• Parents wonder why the streams are bitter when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.- John Locke

• My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm. – Gillian Flynn
• Kids are fat because of lack of parenting. – Ben Shapiro
• Narcissist parents want total control. Take back your control. If possible, don’t accept any money, favor, items or anything from them. – Tina Fuller
• My parents loved us, but I wasn’t always sure they liked us. – Tahereh Maf
• A narcissist parent is easily frustrated by a healthy independent child that they can’t control through parental emotional manipulation. – Shannon Thomas
• Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. Oscar Wilde
• In the narcissistic parent’s eyes, they do no wrong nor do they feel they should be held accountable for the bad and wrong things that they have done. – Katherine Childress
• Don’t you just love children? If they’re not disappointing you, they’re dead. – Shawn Wickersheim
• A person can’t pick up their children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they want them to be. – Carson McCullers
• Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn’t. – Mignon McLaughlin
• 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
• A narcissistic parent will provoke an independent child to anger in order to feel superior and prove the child’s flaws. – Shannon Thomas
• You must let go of the responsibility for the painful events of your childhood and put it where it belongs. – Susan Forward
• Today’s troubled homes are made by parents who want to have children but don’t want their children to have parents. – Agona Apell
• The toxic parent sees the child as a threat to their own ego and having the child overshadow the parent is not an option in their mind. – Shannon Thomas
• Do your kids see your kindness, or are you always telling them NO? – Brenda M. McGraw
• It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody. – Spike Lee
• Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that’s crystal-clear. Richard Dawkins

• People tend to raise the child inside of them rather than the child in front of them. – Joe Newman
• I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting. – Barbara Bush
• Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody? – Catherine Lacey
• There are no illegitimate children – only illegitimate parents. – Leon R. Yankwich
• All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents. Susan Forward
• It is the selfish parents who are to blame. Pay attention, be involved in your children’s lives. They are your legacy, your only hope. – Aaron B. Powell
• Here’s a shock: An adult who still hangs out in skate parks is a bad parent. – Daniel Tosh
• They are not sorry for harming you. So, don’t feel guilty for cutting them off. – John Mark Green
• The hateful and stinging words of a narcissistic parent can linger in the mind of an adult child long after the adult has left home. – Shannon Thomas
• Wounded parents often unintentionally inflict pain and suffering on their children … – David W. Earle
• An unpredictable parent is a fearsome god in the eyes of a child. – Susan Forward
• If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up. – Charles Haddon Spurgeon
• Dysfunctional parents let their children know how burdened they have been by their children and how many sacrifices they had to make in order to raise them. – Dr Marita Sirota
• When you grieve toxic, abusive parents, you don’t just grieve the abuse, you grieve everything you didn’t have. – Lily Hope Lucario
• Being a parent does not give you an excuse for bad manners. – Rosalind Wiseman
• When you have children, there is no room for lies, no room for anything but the truth. Anything other than that is a bad example, I believe. – Johnny Depp
• We raise predators by treating children as prey. – Stefan Molyneux
• If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma. – Tucker Max
• Narcissist parents do not know their children; they aren’t interested in what they have to say unless it affects them. – Tina Fuller
• If we, as mothers, are not careful, we can begin to find our identity in our children and their behavior. – Sue Detweiler
• When a child does bad things, the parents are always going to love their child even if they do something bad. – Selena
• No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education. – Plato

• Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears. – Henry Cloud
• No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him. – Frank Pittman
• Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn’t. – Mignon McLaughlin

Selfish Fathers Quotes

• Denying a child, the joy and memories of being with the other parent is an act of pure evil. – Unknown
• Fathers should know that sons follow their example, not advice. – Unknown
• It doesn’t matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was. – Anne Sexton
• Real dads support their children without the law telling them they have to. – Unknown
• A real parent is someone who put their kids above their own selfish wants and needs. – Unknown
• Sons aspire to either become their father or vie to be his exact opposite. – Unknown
• A greedy father has thieves for children. – Serbian Proverb
• Becoming a father is easy enough, but being one can be very rough. – Wilhelm Busch
• There’s really no point in having children if you’re not going to be home enough to father them. – Anthony Edwards
• Anyone can be a father but it takes someone special to be a dad. – Unknown
• When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching. – Robert Bly
• Every father should remember that one day, his son will follow exactly how his father put his needs above everyone else. – Unknown
• A father shouldn’t have to think of his needs first and then accommodate the child’s needs. – Unknown
• A narcissist parent is easily frustrated by a healthy independent child that they can’t control through parental emotional manipulation. – Shannon Thomas
• Related: Emotional Manipulation: 10 Signs, Effects, And How To Deal
• Some fathers wonder why the streams are bitter when they themselves have poisoned the fountain. – John Locke
• My dad taught me everything I know. Unfortunately, he didn’t teach me everything he knows. – Al Unser
• There’s nothing worse than a man that can be everything to everybody else. Except a father to their own child. – Unknown
• Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male. –Geoffrey Canada
• When you grew up with an absent father, you grew up dreaming and wanting.. But most of all, you grew up way too fast. – Unknown
• My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm. – Gillian Flynn

Selfish Mothers Quotes

• It takes someone really brave to become a mother. As it requires lot of strength to raise a child and love them more than one loves themselves. – Unknown
• If we, as mothers, are not careful we can begin to find our identity in our children and their behavior. – Sue Detweiler
• Do your kids see your kindness or are you always telling them NO? – Brenda M. McGraw
• When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your child. – Unknown
• No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him. – Frank Pittman
• Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn’t. – Mignon McLaughlin
• She shrieked and shrieked for her mother, but her mother was already there. Her mother was the monster. – Holly Black
• The hateful and stinging words of a narcissistic parent can linger in the mind of an adult child long after the adult has left home. – Shannon Thomas
• Related: Best Narcissist Quotes That Help You Understand Them Better
• If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much. – Jackie Kennedy
• Don’t make your selfishness ruin your child’s life. – Unknown
• Any mother that could be cruel to a child is not going to apologize to that child when they have grown up. – Rayne Wolf.
• A good mother never uses her child for her happiness. – Unknown
• If a mother cannot sacrifice for her kids, she doesn’t deserve them! – Unknown

If you are the child of a selfish parent, these Selfish Parents Quotes can provide comfort and validation. They remind us that our feelings are valid and we’re not alone in our struggles. Furthermore, they provide motivation to heal and move forward despite any difficulties that have come your way.

Selfish parenting can have detrimental effects on both parents and children alike. To combat it, it’s essential to recognize the signs of selfish parenting and strive towards becoming more selfless for your kids’ sake. These 500+ Selfish Parents Quotes offer inspiration and reflection to all those affected by it – remember that you’re not alone and with time and effort healing is possible.