Mary Jo Bane Quotes

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 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.

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

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

Men have the influence and power in business and politics. It is the mother who can make the child's bedtime earlier, take away desserts or ground the child.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

I wish my parents could have raised every man out there.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

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.

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

Cultures need stable families to raise stable children.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

It takes a village to raise a child.

It Takes A Village

I didn't grow up with a lot of babies in my life because I only grew up with my parents - I didn't have any brothers or sisters - and I didn't have my family close by.

Children are raised by single parents all the time. Those children - I'd like to claim myself as one, I was raised by a single mother who raised me incredibly well.

Cohabitation itself doesn't cause ineffective parenting.

In my neighborhood growing up, 8, 10,12 kids were the norm. Those stay-at-home moms would handle so much physically and emotionally. Even in my early teens, I could tell those ladies were something.

I'm so thrilled to get to raise my kids in the environment that they are in. I think it's easy just to imagine that all these kids are spoiled and entitled. Part of what makes me be strong with my kids is the fact that I'm surrounded by other really firm strong moms.

It takes a village to raise a child; that's how I basically balance it. It's twenty four hours in a day.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

I'll never get sick of raising my children, but other people might get sick of them.

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable