Bil Keane Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

The idea that there is a family somewhere who functions is an odd concept.

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

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.

Is a family just the strict definition of a small and discrete unit, or is it about the larger organic group that inevitably grows up around the smaller one?

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother 'worked' at anything besides raising her children.

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

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

Today the family is being attacked and defended with equal vehemence.

I don't know how many modern families watch 'Modern Family,' but then one of the points of 'Modern Family' is that it's hard to tell what a modern family is anymore, let alone what it does.

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.

I come from a typical family.

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

We are redefining the concept of marriage to say that fathers are optional.

The concept of 'family' has changed so much. It's not just 'mom and dad' anymore. It's 'mom and mom' and 'dad and dad,' and it's kind of beautiful.

When everything kind of hit the fan, my dad married Jo Anne, and suddenly there were five kids from the Ripleys and five kids from the Doughertys. Then my dad and Joanne had a baby. I usually have to make a diagram.

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.

Ever wonder why people are so determined to reach for white picket fences, supposed normalcy, a nuclear family? Well, try growing up without one.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

The family is not only a living arrangement. It has always been a symbol of survival.