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Parenting & Family Quote by Kelly Preston

"They are amazing kids so we let them make decisions but also have discipline"

About this Quote

There’s a neat piece of celebrity-parent tightrope walking baked into this line: the careful promise that your household is both enlightened and in control. “Amazing kids” leads with admiration, a public-facing shield that frames the children as inherently good - not problems to manage, but people to trust. Then comes the modern parenting virtue signal: “so we let them make decisions.” It nods to autonomy, emotional intelligence, the post-authoritarian ideal where kids aren’t just compliant, they’re competent.

But the sentence doesn’t dare stop there. “But also have discipline” snaps the rope taut. That “but” is doing the heavy lifting, anticipating the reader’s skepticism: if you let kids decide things, aren’t you raising little tyrants? Preston preemptively answers with a second value, one that reassures older-school audiences and tabloids alike that this isn’t permissive chaos. Discipline functions as both parenting philosophy and reputation management: a way of saying, we’re not negligent, we’re balanced.

The phrasing is tellingly generic - “make decisions” about what, exactly? Bedtime, school, career, screen time? The vagueness is strategic, allowing listeners to project their own version of “good boundaries” onto her. It’s also the voice of a public figure who has to translate private family life into a safe sound bite: warm, relatable, non-controversial.

Context matters: celebrity parenting is a performance under scrutiny, where too strict reads as cold, too loose reads as irresponsible. This quote aims to occupy the culturally approved middle lane: freedom with guardrails, affection with authority.

Quote Details

TopicParenting
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Preston, Kelly. (2026, January 17). They are amazing kids so we let them make decisions but also have discipline. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/they-are-amazing-kids-so-we-let-them-make-55565/

Chicago Style
Preston, Kelly. "They are amazing kids so we let them make decisions but also have discipline." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/they-are-amazing-kids-so-we-let-them-make-55565/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"They are amazing kids so we let them make decisions but also have discipline." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/they-are-amazing-kids-so-we-let-them-make-55565/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Kelly Preston

Kelly Preston (born October 13, 1962) is a Actress from USA.

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