Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

In Tiger's Bay I saw trouble I shouldn't have seen. But 95% of the people there are good and they're coming out to support me - just like in New Lodge which is the opposition or whatever you want to call it.

I have a large family with lots of little kids.

As the Japanese family gets more and more atomized, grandparents don't live with the nuclear family, so parents of children can't consult with their own parents about how to raise their children and rely on that to help raise them.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

I come from a typical family.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

It's really important to recognize that family life in America has changed pretty dramatically.

I come from a large family so you can count on the fact that I'm going to have more kids.

The power of community to create health is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital.

I'm the youngest of six children; both of my sisters are housewives and they each have four kids.

America used to have a strong 'moral safety net' for its people. Today that net is badly frayed, not only because families are disintegrating but also because the church doesn't play the same role that it once did in many Americans' lives.

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

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.

Hillary Clinton famously talked about how raising a child takes a village. Except our society isn't set up that way. We're organized in nuclear units, and a single mom can ask her friends only so many times for help picking up the kids.

We're fortunate in my family because we really have three families: my brother, David, and me; the two boys, Cooper and Marston, from my dad's second marriage; and my dad's wife, Crystal.

My older brothers and sisters have kids and families.

The father-mother family with two children isolated in a city flat is already insufficient.

Church gives people a sense of community, a sense of how to behave... social support when times get tough. In a world where white working class folks are going to church less and less, they're losing that when they might really need it.

I have a big family. Even though it's only three kids in our family, it's always aunts and uncles and the whole thing.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.