Parental Dynamics Quotes

As a dad, you are the Vice President of the executive branch of parenting. It doesn't matter what your personality is like, you will always be Al Gore to your wife's Bill Clinton. She feels the pain and you are the annoying nerd telling them to turn off the lights.

I'm always fascinated by the theme of children who parent the adults.

Every father says the same thing: “Where's your mother?”

The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.

In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

My mother was an artist and highly strung, whereas my father was much calmer.

My mom and I had secret from my dad that we didn't think we were stupid, that we didn't think we needed feminism to be explained to us.

I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.

I'm not saying that men make better fathers than women do mothers.

Mother was the disciplinarian, but it was Daddy who could turn me into an angel with just one look.

There’s no winning arguments with your parents, so why get all pumped up over them? It is way better to dive down and get out of the way than it is to get clobbered by some parental tidal wave.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

My parents lived likeas the neighbours described thema pair of chopsticks, always in harmony.

My father is very dry and very quick-witted, and my mother is very silly. It was the perfect combination because I got an education in physical and verbal comedy.