Parenting Roles Quotes

Women are only half responsible for children. Men raise children as much as women do. Until men are as nurturing as women are, and until women are as active outside the home as men are, we won't have democratic families, and therefore we won't have democracy, and we will continue this hierarchical notion of life.

The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.

Be a father first. Don't put a priority of being a friend with your wife first, or a friend with your kids first.

I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible. I want women and men to be able to be full-time parents or full-time working people or any combination of the two.

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.

My mother has always kept the entire family together - my dad, due to his business, has always been travelling, and hence, she at times had to play the role of a father and a mother as well.

I don't mind being a grandfather; I've been a mother for so many years. You just can't believe what it's like being a father. Especially when you come out of the chaos of the road to getting married and having children.

I think men and women are the same. Even as parents, I think we're the same. We're just conditioned to think that we're different. Having said that, it's true that motherhood is a particularly vulnerable area. It's an open wound, really. A woman is exposed to being turned into a different kind of person by the experience of motherhood.

Being a stepfather is a huge challenge.

The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.

It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.

Gerard and I pretty much share all parenting responsibilities, although I'm definitely the disciplinarian.

Mothers are so awesome. They do so much. They wear so many hats and have very passionate relationships with their kids, and with life, and I think it's a real balance having your own existence and then being this responsible, kind of loving person in someone else's life or several other people's lives.

The mother may be doing ninety percent of the disciplining, but the father still must have a full-time acceptance of all the children. He never must say, "Get these kids out of here; I'm trying to watch TV." If he ever does start saying this, he is liable to see one of his kids on the six o'clock news.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers...but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.

Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.

I was watching the Animal Planet. Did you know that the male seahorse has the baby? Why don't they just call that one the female?

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income.

Men want to play a bigger and equal role in raising their children, but as a society we don't support them in that.

It's important to show that fathers do cook for their children. Mine sure did.

I think if I tried to be the stern parent, we would have slipped into Cinderella mode - with me as the evil stepmother!

Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.

We wondered why when a child laughed, he belonged to Daddy, and when he had a sagging diaper that smelled like a landfill, 'He wants his mother.'

I don't support gay marriage; indeed, I find it to be unnatural in the deepest sense of that word…. Marriage must, indeed, be re-founded on a much more radical level than that imagined by the egalitarian ‘Religious Right’ and ‘Constitutionalists’; marriage must not merely be ‘between a man and woman’; the family must become an integral part of the health of our race — of our charge to birth a strong, intelligent, beautiful, and productive people.