David Blankenhorn Quotes

I don't think that all girls seek the influence of older men, but I think girls whose fathers are absent or recessed from their lives often do. And honestly, when I was growing up, fathers were generally pretty absent from their children's lives. We didn't see a lot of them. That may be something that has genuinely changed for the better in our culture: men are more present for their children now that more women are working.

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

I was actually very fortunate. I think I was actually the only kid in my class at one stage that actually had a father in the home.

Fathers are so necessary as examples and guides for our children in wisdom and virtue. Without father figures, young people often feel orphaned; left adrift at a critical moment in their growth and development.

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.

More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers.

My eldest son, Jack, grew up with me as a 'part-time' dad.

That's so important for children when they're growing up, to have a strong male role model.

Every single kid in my group of friends at school was from a single-parent family.

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.

I love having my son in my life. That's why it's more fathers in the hip-hop community, because they probably went through a fatherless childhood like I did.

Well, I think one of the big things wrong with kids these days, a lot of them don't have a family. A lot of them got one parent and there's quite a few that don't have any parents and that's where the whole problem is. There's no family life, no father to slap 'em around when they need it.

I grew up without a father figure.

When I became a father acting sort of took the place of what I did in my free time and my children became the main focus. I play a lot and my children play. Both my sons - my daughter's still too young really - have surpassed me with their music skills, which is wildly irritating.

We need our Dads right now, we need strong fathers. I really want fathers to get close to their children.

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

A good father. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father, but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.

When we look at our children, I think a lot of the troubles we're having as a society is because we don't have strong fathers in these families that can tell their kids that they can do more.

Fathers have a unique and irreplaceable role in the lives of children.

The happiest and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of the fatherhood of God.

She didn't have a daddy?" I asked. "No." "Did you have a daddy?" "You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men.

The message was that... fathers can go ahead and have children, but they don't have to raise the children.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

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?

Some authority on parenting once said, "Hold them very close and then let them go." This is the hardest truth for a father to learn: that his children are continuously growing up and moving away from him (until, of course, they move back in).