Mary Calderone Quotes

Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

When my kids started preschool, the teachers had to take away all the fake bananas because all the boys would pick them up and pretend that they were guns. Boys find sticks to play swords and anything that looks like a gun to shoot. It's just inside of them. It's who they are.

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

If parents don't instruct their kids on the narrow boundaries of respectful behavior toward the opposite sex, their kids won't learn it anywhere else.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature - and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

All that the future holds in store for each sacred child of God will be shaped by his or her parents, family, friends, and teachers. Thus, our faith now becomes part of our posterity's faith later.

When you're a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.

I think children learn through their parents.

Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child's peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.

From a very young age, parents are pushing their boys to achieve in a way they don't always do for girls.

There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother, but next in rank in efficacy is that of the schoolmaster.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

I think women are very ambidextrous. We don't think twice about reading a book or a movie starring guys. But for guys, it's, like, 'Oh my God, that's a woman thing.' So with my son, I very carefully portion out the female heroes and characters to make sure he's getting an equal amount.

I'm a child of academics.

Kids are soft these days, period, end of the story in every respect. People coddle them too much. I'm sick of that; it's irresponsible parenting. Taking care of them is one thing, but turning little boys into little girls because you're coddling them so much, kids need to have experiences on their own.

If you grow up and your mother or father is a doctor you talk about medicine at the dinner table. In our case we talked about politics at the dinner table.

Things that I now recognise as just part of my personality - willfulness and assertiveness, maybe even a bit of aggressiveness - these are things that I had been raised to think of as masculine features. I always thought there was probably something wrong with me.

I have never felt oppressed by women or that feminism is a problem. I do think boys find it hard to like things seen as feminine. I want my son not to feel self-conscious he likes ballet and my daughter to carry on playing Han Solo; that's all.

I don't think anyone is saying that we should be treating boys and girls exactly the same and that we should try to eliminate all differences. What the psychologists who do this work are saying is we should be aware of it and careful about it, especially if we think it could be limiting choices.

People are shaped in myriad ways by their upbringing and family. We also have agency in our lives, the people we become, and the lives we lead.

I feel myself in ways to be the product of internalized male gaze.