I couldn't see much point in tying myself down to a middle-aged woman with four children, even though the woman was my wife and the children were my own.
Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.
I'm a father of four so whenever I'm not working my kids have their different sports, or plays, or school performances, so I don't do a whole lot of other stuff besides being a dad.
Parenting is not for everybody. It changes your life. Especially when they're little.
Some children act as if they thought their parents had nothing to do, but to see them established in the world and then quit it.
It used to be believed that the parent had unlimited claims on the child and rights over him. In a truer view of the matter, we are coming to see that the rights are on the side of the child and the duties on the side of the parent.
Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.
So immense are the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and thoughts, that she cannot ... meet them all and find any large margin beyond for other cares and work. She serves the community in the very best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving birth to healthy children, whose physical strength has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and mental nature she can give the whole of her thoughts.
No parent should have to choose between their job and caring for their child, and no person should miss valuable moments with their loved ones because of work.
Some women work while they are pregnant, but not me. That was a choice I had made. That's when I took a break. Men can work at whatever stage they are; whether they turn daddy, they still have their own thing. But women can't afford that because by being mothers, they have to be there for their kids.
I'm not saying to be happy you must be married. Nor am I saying that to be happy you need children. I'm saying that if you opt for children - be you man or woman - you have to take care of them.
No one's raising children any more. To love a child, you've got to work for it. You have to change its diapers and feed it at night!
It's very difficult leaving the house anytime with my baby at home.
I went home every night to New Jersey - or most nights - and to help with the six-grade math homework or to make breakfast in the morning, just to make sure that that was there. When I was single and didn't have children, I used to laugh at this notion of quality time.
I got a family I got to answer to. I got kids... my older parents and my preachers and everybody.
The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.
It's not my business to raise anybody else's kids. Mom and Dad got to do all that.
I have a two-year-old at home, and my whole life is - besides revolved around keeping this little person alive, just watching them on the stairs and eating food and everything of every minute of every day - you plan what time you're going to bed so that you can be your best self first thing in the morning.
I'm a parent, I gotta be a super dad.
It's hard having kids because it's boring... It's just being with them on the floor while they be children. They read Clifford the Big Red Dog to you at a rate of 50 minutes a page, and you have to sit there and be horribly proud and bored at the same time.
Hee that hath a wife and children wants not businesse.
Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resources to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood.
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.
That is the really great thing about being an adult male, once you get married and have children the whole decision-making process is taken out of your hands, and I for one am extremely grateful.
