Top 35 Laura Markham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “As the family therapist Virginia Satir famously said, “We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need twelve hugs a day for growth.” Hug your child first thing every morning, every time you say good-bye or hello, and as often as you can in between.”

— Laura Markham

2. “Whenever we get “triggered,” we’ve stumbled on something that needs healing. Seriously. Any time your child pushes your buttons, he’s showing you an unresolved issue from your own childhood.”

— Laura Markham

3. “It’s bath time. Do you want to go now or in five minutes? Okay, five minutes with no fuss? Let’s shake on it.”

— Laura Markham

4. “All misbehavior is a cry for help or connection. Respond to the need, and the behavior will change. If a child isn’t meeting our expectations, she needs more support to do so, whether that’s teaching, connection, or help in working through the emotions that are getting in her way. Much of what we consider “misbehavior” is normal childishness and can be “corrected” simply through loving guidance.”

— Laura Markham

5. “Human beings weren’t designed to handle the amount of stress our modern life loads on us, which makes it difficult to hear our natural parenting instincts. It’s almost as if we’re forced to parent in our spare time, after meeting the demands of work, commuting and household responsibilities.”

— Laura Markham

6. “Most parents think that if our child would just “behave,” we could maintain our composure as parents. The truth is that managing our own emotions and actions is what allows us to feel peaceful as parents. Ultimately we can’t control our children or the hand life deals them – but we can always control our own actions. Parenting isn’t about what our child does, but about how we respond.”

— Laura Markham

7. “Because no matter how bad your child’s behavior, it’s a cry for help. Sometimes the behavior requires a firm limit, but it never requires us to be mean. And you can’t help your child while you’re shouting.”

— Laura Markham

8. “Parenting isn’t about what our child does, but about how we respond.”

— Laura Markham

9. “From your child’s perspective, discipline isn’t the way you teach her appropriate behavior. Rather, your child correctly sees discipline as the way you handle conflict when family members get upset or have conflicting desires. In other words, the way you discipline your child becomes her model for working out interpersonal problems. So punishment, which is the use of force, teaches her to use force against her siblings whenever there’s a problem to be solved.”

— Laura Markham

10. “The most important parenting skill: Manage yourself. Take care of yourself so you aren’t venting on your child. Intervene before your own feelings get out of hand. Keep your cup full. The more you care for yourself with compassion, the more love and compassion you’ll have for your child. Remember that your child will do every single thing you do, whether that’s yelling or making self-disparaging remarks about your body.”

— Laura Markham

11. “Your goal in disciplining your child is actually to help him develop self-discipline, meaning to assume responsibility for his actions, including making amends and avoiding a repeat, whether the authority figure is present or not.”

— Laura Markham

12. “Sometimes our child’s strong emotions are triggered by essential needs that go unmet, needs the child can’t verbalize. Most parents focus on physical needs like sleep, food, and cleanliness. But often we forget their deeper needs:.”

— Laura Markham

13. “Mindfulness is the opposite of “losing” your temper. Don’t get me wrong – mindfulness doesn’t mean you don’t feel anger. Being mindful means that you pay attention to what you’re feeling, but don’t act on it. Anger is part of all relationships. Acting on it mindlessly, with words or actions, is what compromises our parenting.”

— Laura Markham

14. “The moments that make our hearts melt make all the very real sacrifices worthwhile.”

— Laura Markham

15. “Leaving our baby to cry also changes us as parents. We have to turn off our natural empathy for our baby, the same empathy that is so essential to helping our child develop emotional intelligence.”

— Laura Markham

16. “Why is bedtime so hard for many families? Because the needs of parents and children clash. To parents, bedtime is the time they finally get to separate from their children and have a little time to themselves. To children, bedtime is the time they’re forced to separate from their parents and lie in the dark by themselves. On top of that, children are exhausted and wound up, and parents are exhausted and fed up. No wonder it’s the single most challenging time in most families.”

— Laura Markham

17. “What matters most: Stay connected and never withdraw your love, even for a moment. The deepest reason kids cooperate is that they love you and want to please you. Above all, safeguard your relationship with your child. That’s your only leverage to have any influence on your child. It’s what your child needs most. And that closeness is what makes all the sacrifices of parenting worth it.”

— Laura Markham

18. “The most obvious sign that your relationship with your child needs some repair work is defiance. Children will always have priorities that differ from ours, but they want to feel good about their relationship with us, so they actually want to cooperate. When they don’t, it’s usually a signal of disconnection. So defiance isn’t a discipline problem, it’s a relationship problem.”

— Laura Markham

19. “If you have to wake your children in the morning, they aren’t getting enough sleep. Every hour of sleep less than they need sets them back a year in access to brain function, meaning they act a year younger.”

— Laura Markham

20. “Kids raised from birth on to feel safe expressing their emotions, who feel their parents are on their side, aren’t perfect. They’re easier to parent, though, because they’re better at managing their emotions, and therefore their behavior. They’re more willing to accept our guidance.”

— Laura Markham

21. “What raises great kids is coaching them – to handle their emotions, manage their behavior, and develop mastery – rather than controlling for immediate compliance.”

— Laura Markham

22. “Get yourself to bed earlier. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but if you have to use an alarm, you aren’t getting enough sleep, either. Your child depends on you to start your own day with a “full cup.” There’s no way to stay patient when you’re exhausted.”

— Laura Markham

23. “Our children don’t need perfection from us. What they need is a parent who embraces growth, makes amends, and opens her heart when it wants to harden.”

— Laura Markham

24. “So while you can’t control your children, you can control someone who has a tremendous influence on how your children relate to each other. You.”

— Laura Markham

25. “I need to calm down before I can talk about this.”

— Laura Markham

26. “The constructive way to handle anger is to limit our expression of it, and when we calm down, to use it diagnostically: what is so wrong in our life that we feel furious, and what do we need to do to change the situation?”

— Laura Markham

27. “It’s almost as if we’re forced to parent in our spare time, after meeting the demands of work, commuting and household responsibilities. Even worse, our culture erodes our relationship with our children and woos them away from us at too early an age. But.”

— Laura Markham

28. “Despite the popular idea that we need to “express” our anger so that it doesn’t eat away at us, research shows that expressing anger while we are angry actually makes us more angry. This.”

— Laura Markham

29. “I am too mad right now to talk about this. I am going to take a time-out and calm down.”

— Laura Markham

30. “When children feel powerless to convince us that their needs are legitimate, they whine, turn everything into a power struggle or become apathetic or defiant. We usually call this bad behaviour, but we could also think of it as a childish, dysfunctional strategy to meet the child’s legitimate needs.”

— Laura Markham

31. “Soothing is essential to all infants, whose brains develop the capacity to regulate negative emotion directly from the experience of being soothed. Most, although not all, infants insist on being held and carried much of the time, which helps them regulate themselves physiologically.”

— Laura Markham

32. “The more often we get angry, the more defended our child becomes, and therefore the less likely to show that it bothers her. Anger pushes children of all ages away from us. It practically guarantees that they’ll have an “attitude” by the time they’re ten, and that yelling fights will be the norm during their teen years. The unfortunate result of yelling is a child who is less likely to want to please you and is more open to the influences of the peer group and the larger culture.”

— Laura Markham

33. “Since parents are the role model, you’ll hear your child speak to his sister or brother using your words and tone of voice. Children.”

— Laura Markham

34. “Unless they have the opportunity to experience therapy or another transformational love relationship, they may not develop much capacity for intimacy.”

— Laura Markham

35. “Babies who are told “No!” all the time learn to think inside the box.”

— Laura Markham

36. “Yelling escalates a difficult situation, turning it from a squall into a storm. And really, how can you expect your child to learn to control his own emotions if you don’t control yours?”

— Laura Markham

37. “To help children with emotions, we first need to understand that once we let ourselves feel an emotion, it begins to dissipate.”

— Laura Markham