Gloria Gaynor Quotes

Families were living separately from the fathers. And so although, according to African culture, men were the head of the household, the truth is women were the ones who were raising everybody, including men. And growing up with my mother, that was something I really learned to appreciate.

Growing up, I didn't know about families who were missing a father, because there weren't any in our neighborhood. Today over a third of American children are born into single-parent homes. Is this all men's doing?

if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.

[My parents] met in university back in the '70s. And I didn't grow up with my father. He - they separated before I was born.

I never really saw [my father] at all when I was growing up.

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above", I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.

Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don't misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence

I think rappers are the fall guy because some of us don't have the wits to point the finger back. The thing is when you take a whole generation and whip them out, string the mothers out and put the fathers in jail - the reason I know respect is because my father is the mediator between me and my grandfather. I'm the mediator between my son and my father because I'm old enough to understand where my father is coming from and young enough to understand what my kid is trying to do. When you whip out the mediator the kids run wild and the old people are scared of them.

I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.

I was an only child growing up, and my father passed away when I was twelve, so for most of my life, it was just me and my momma. We were really, really close. Learning to live in the world without her has been incredibly hard. At first, it didn't make any sense - how to do it, to live without her - but you slowly get somewhat used to it.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

That is not a crack house. It is a house with a family with a father and a mother and three sons and a daughter.

Fatherlessness is a rot that is eating away at the modern soul.

My parents were kids when I was born. My mother was 16. My father was 17, and they got married in high school. And they split a few years later. When they split was when all that was happening also, and he - they were just coming into themselves. But they remained friends.

Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living.

What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.

For a moment, I was captivated as I studied them side by side. My mother: the perfect picture of guardian excellence and decorum. My father: always capable of achieving his goals, no matter how twisted the means. Uneasily, I began to understand how I’d inherited my bizarre personality.

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

I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason. I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn't face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. Mother, father. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.

When a man does not live with his children and does not get along with the mother of his children, his fatherhood becomes essentially untenable, regardless of how he feels, how hard he tries, or whether he is a good guy. Almost by definition, he has become de-fathered.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

I am my father's daughter. It was not up to me growing up. I was his hunting and fishing buddy, so I've been shooting my whole life.

There are a lot of very fine upstanding gays who are good citizens and all that. I am not making a decision for individual people. But when it comes to a societal policy, I think there are not enough babies for adoption to go around. I think a preference should be given to families with a mother and father who have a lifetime commitment.

If fathers aren't growing up, I would challenge them to want to be a father that is present in the home, so that their kids have that identity.

The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.