Stephanie Coontz Quotes

It is obvious that the role of the father as the central authority in the family has been considerably challenged in Western societies. Parental responsibilities, and I knowingly use the term responsibility instead of the term authority still used in the French Civil code, are nowadays shared equally between both parents.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

If you've got a lot of children, I think you let the other children bring them up more and you just sort of step in and do stuff like every now and again.

Just as the unique characteristics of both males and females contribute to the completeness of a marriage relationship, so those same characteristics are vital to the rearing, nurturing, and teaching of children.

I am like a friend to my kids. My wife, Sangeeta, handles their studies, etc.

Every child needs both parents.

While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.

I'm a pretty hands-on dad and make the most of my custody. I take care of my little one whenever I can, and she determines what I can do and where I can do it.

Studies show that children best flourish when one mom and one dad are there to raise them.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

Women may give lip service to wanting husbands who take on an equal role in raising children, but many will pull rank when an important decision, like how to discipline or what baby sitter to hire, has to be made.

I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.

Of course, the ideal scenario for parenting is obviously two parents of a mature age.

We need to stop the erosion of parental authority.

And part of that is, what is the point of having children if you don't have the privilege of bringing them up?

I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.

Of the many horrors of divorce, the most egregious is that it robs a kid of the best of both worlds. Dads can do many things that even the best moms can't, and vice versa.

It takes three to make a child.

I'm not saying that men make better fathers than women do mothers.

Fathers in today's modern families can be so many things.

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

My mother worked in advertising and my father was a journalist. But they split up when I was three and I grew up in a single-parent family. My mum brought my brother and I up.

There is not a single extant study that supports all the arguments against men being with their children. It's absolute bollocks.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.