Male Upbringing Quotes

What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it.

We're not raising grass. We're raising boys.

I need to raise my kids. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to raise kids and make men of them these days. I don't want them to be lazy and just spend their father's money.

I've had to live with women all my life. I grew up with four older sisters, and I was the baby and the only boy.

There is no doubt that every healthy, normal boy...should own a dog at some time in his life, preferably between the ages of forty-five and fifty.

Men are mostly raised by women. Most men have not seen an authoritative woman since they were 8. They associate women in authority with childhood.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many parents were generally standoffish with their male children and acted as if they were raising a generation of would-be soldiers. I remember some of my friends' parents who would shake their children's hands at bedtime.

I'm one of three boys raised by a single mom in a military beach town in the South.

I grew up in a household with two brothers and we lived in the bush. We were constantly building weapons and forts and things. But I didn't set out to be an action hero.

When you're the youngest and the only boy, you get spoilt but you get told you're spoilt so you don't get to enjoy it very much. I was the only man in the house because my parents divorced and my dad moved away when I was 13.

When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes-- remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education-- make them hunters.

Harshness is for the good of a boy, soft-heartedness will ruin him.

Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right.

What cooler way to grow up for an American boy than to be around cars and football?

I used to stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom. I shared a bedroom - like a lot of people in my era, in my neighborhood - with my two brothers and an uncle. And I'd stand there in front of the mirror over the dresser and I would practice: meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views of Cicero, Bacon and Baba.

The period of a [Persian] boy's education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.