Toni Morrison Quotes

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.

One thing I found out was that we need extended families. We need gangs. And, of course, if they're tribes and clans and so forth have been dispersed by the industrial revolution by people looking for work wherever they can find it. And a nuclear family, a man, a woman and kids and a dog and cat is no survival scheme at all. Horribly vulnerable.

I want people to get involved and to connect with veterans.

Studies show that children best flourish when one mom and one dad are there to raise them.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

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.

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

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.

It takes a village to raise a child.

The family is the corner-stone of society

It Takes A Village

We don’t want a village to raise a child. We want a family.

My kids are part of the rest of my community and my wider family.

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.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

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.

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

The family is the corner stone of our society.

Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.

Family . . . the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.

Barbara [my wife] and I said a long time ago that if we were in a position to help somebody, it would be kids. So when we started the Memorial Tournament (in Columbus, OH), Nationwide Children's Hospital, which saved my daughter's life when she was less than a year old, was the beneficiary from day one.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.