If your parent is deployed and you are that young, you spend the whole time wondering where they are and waiting for them to come home. As time passes and the absence is longer and longer, you become more and more concerned - but you don't really have the words to express your concern. There's only this continued absence.
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
'I Know You Care' is about my dad. And I haven't seen him for a long, long time. And my parents divorced when I was really young. And I guess I just wanted a - it was my way of saying that I wasn't bitter or angry anymore. I was just sad and just felt like something was missing.
More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers.
I have visited classrooms near military bases to learn more about what schools were doing to support their military kids. I met with teachers overseas to learn about the particular needs they face thousands of miles from America. And I listened to my own granddaughter, who dealt with her father's yearlong deployment to Iraq.
Young men are obsessed with their dads, and they remain obsessed if the dad is not around. Remember that there was a lot of discussion about how George W. Bush might have invaded Iraq to atone for the failures of his dad.
I come from a home where my mother was the only emotional umbrella under which we found all the warmth and comforts and sustenance. My father would come and go, and not as often as we'd want him to.
My dad died, and he wasn't in my life because he had schizophrenia, so it's been something that my entire family has been fighting against since I can remember.
When I was growing up, I never really knew my father. I didn't get to know my father until I was about 14 years old.
I grew up without a father, and my mother grew up without a father and her mother grew up without a father. So we have this long heritage of growing up without fathers.
I have no worthwhile memories of my father, therefore no idea of what a father's role should be.
Didn't you ever have a father yourself? You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.' So I figured it's because I never had a father that I don't want one now. A person can't miss something she never had.
It's sometimes better to have a father figure to rebel against than nothing, than just a black hole or an absence.
I think rappers are the fall guy because some of us don't have the wits to point the finger back. The thing is when you take a whole generation and whip them out, string the mothers out and put the fathers in jail - the reason I know respect is because my father is the mediator between me and my grandfather. I'm the mediator between my son and my father because I'm old enough to understand where my father is coming from and young enough to understand what my kid is trying to do. When you whip out the mediator the kids run wild and the old people are scared of them.
I had a working mother. She worked for IBM. My dad lived in another town - not very far away, but another town. So food was - I guess food was my friend.
My father, he left the family when I was 13, so mum looked after us.
I never really saw [my father] at all when I was growing up.
My parents are separated. My father left when I was six years old.
My overwhelming memory of being a child is the huge amount of love I felt for my mum. She was my everything, because she was both my mum and my dad.
When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.
I was 2 when my parents - actress Connie Stevens and singer Eddie Fisher - divorced. I was too young to experience the pain of their split, but it was rough growing up with a father who wasn't there.
My parents got put into jail, both my mom and my dad.
The only time I've really been away from my kids to do work was doing Shall We Dance because they both were in camp and it was the first time in twenty years that I haven't been with my kids.
A child's hope is that your father comes riding in on that white stallion and saves them. You can't make somebody love you the way you want them to love you, it's not a Leave it to Beaver type world. This isn't television. Life's a lot more cruel than that.
My mom had me when she was 16, and I was an only child, which is probably why I received a lot of love and didn't miss that my father wasn't around.
