P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

A child's first teacher is its mother.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

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.

I just don't believe that a woman is naturally closer to her child than a man. Not at all.

In our society leaving baby with Daddy is just one step above leaving the kids to be raised by wolves or apes.

Sometimes the father feels pushed out because of the connection between the mother and the child.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

Mothers play an important role as the heart of the home, but this in no way lessens the equally important role fathers should play, as head of the home, in nurturing, training, and loving their children.

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

The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.

It gets to you as a father when your kids don't react to you in the way you imagine.

Every child needs both parents.

Because you give birth, because you impregnate someone, that does not automatically give you that title of mother or father. You earn the title.

When a child is small, it is his mother who is mainly responsible for the way he is brought up. So it was with me. I belonged in those days to my mother rather than my father.

As anyone who is a father or mother out there can tell you, it's pretty amazing.

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.

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

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.

When you hold your baby in your arms the first time, and you think of all the things you can say and do to influence him, it's a tremendous responsibility. What you do with him can influence not only him, but everyone he meets and not for a day or a month or a year but for time and eternity.

I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance.

I never turned down a mother role.

Things parents say to children are oftentimes not heard, but in some cases you pick up on things that your parent would like to see you have done.

There's all kinds of mothers, so to use the label 'mother' and to think you really understood all that a human being is because she's a mother, is a mistake.

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

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.