Patti Davis Quotes

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.

A family is really a union of two separate entities. When you get married, you are marrying one family into another.

We're all a big hippie family so I got five sisters and a bunch of different mothers. Not really, but my sisters' mothers are all good friends with my mother. We're a big family, 25 people.

I wasn't like a Fifties dad.

Those days of every child having a mummy and daddy who lived at home - Daddy went to work, and Mummy stayed at home and took care of everyone - those days have almost gone, and it's so much more unconventional now.

I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it's good. But what if you don't fit into what is expected of you?

I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it's the most neurotic life-style ever developed.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

Every family is different. I am mom and I am dad and I'm going to do my best. You should be proud, walk through life saying I have the coolest family. I am part of a modern family.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

When you are born into a family like mine, you don't really know anything else. But you quickly realise that it's more about other people and how they are dealing with it. Some can be hugely in awe or uncomfortable, but to you, your parents are just your parents.

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

Family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a mother, a father, a little brother, and an older sister.

I've got two families.

I was an only child, but then my parents resettled with different partners, and I am now one of six.

Some of us stay married because we're in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage.

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

The mother-in-law is the centre of a family.

I was brought up by my grandparents. So people go, 'Oh, what was that like? That must have been hard.' And you go: 'No, it wasn't.' It was just completely actually normal because the new norm seems to be whatever you make of it, doesn't it?

The family is the first essential cell of human society.

My son has two loving parents and an extended family, whether it's cousins or stepmothers or boyfriends. My son is surrounded by love.

My son has one parent who's 50. I want him to have a family of young people, too!

I'm proud of my family, very proud - I have ten grandchildren, four children, and one wife.