Raising Family Quotes & Sayings

Breast cancer, whether I like it or not, is part of my family's story. That's why I am so passionate about raising awareness, because I have seen firsthand how it can impact others. — DeAngelo Williams

Women are, in my view, natural peacemakers. As givers and nurturers of life, through their focus on human relationships and their engagement with the demanding work of raising children and protecting family life, they develop a deep sense of empathy that cuts through to underlying human realities. — Daisaku Ikeda

Raising a family is difficult enough. But it's even more difficult for single parents struggling to make ends meet. They don't need more obstacles. They need more opportunities. — Bill Richardson

[A]s we celebrate 75 years of the minimum wage, we must also recognize that it is no longer achieving its potential impact in our economy or for America's working families. Every American deserves the chance to build a better life for his or her family - and raising the minimum wage will provide that opportunity. — Tom Harkin

After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. I have always had to have an outlet for my creativity and when my life became more about raising my family than the bright lights of show business exploring my photo art was a great outlet for me. — Angela Cartwright

My grandfather did a lot of things in his life. What he was most proud of was raising his family. — Tagg Romney

The biggest mistake that parents make, is believing that their assigned task in life is to teach their children and to guide them in every situation of their children's lives. The truth is that it is the task of parents to both learn from their children and to guide them as well. Parenting is a relationship that goes both ways, from the moment your child is born, you learn from that person, and in fact, your lessons begin long before your child's lessons do. Later on, when you've learned a great deal already, then they begin to learn from you. Throughout our lives, it is a give-and-take relationship, in many ways. Our assigned task is to learn from our children, and to guide and teach them. Their assigned task is to learn from us, and also to teach us. — C. JoyBell C.

People are interested in family traditions, and I think a lot of families can benefit from some of the ways that my parents dealt with the challenges of raising four kids. — Ralph Nader

I come from an Irish Catholic family, and hell-raising is part of the DNA. — Brian Dennehy

Raising human offspring is an endeavor nothing less than a continued labor of patience, hard work, organization and ongoing adaptation. All of which is unlike that expected of any other living creatures on the planet (or this sector of the universe, as far as we can tell). It demands the most complex responsibility and long-term commitment of any parenting life-form. Indeed, it is at times, at least for quality parents, an overwhelming, exhausting, even daunting task. Albeit, one that in the end, (and, most of the time even in the middle of it), is more than worth it. — Connie Kerbs

Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn's soul begs for the artist's touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

But birth control can also be compelled by sinful motivations. These can include putting lesser priorities like career above higher priorities like family or greedily wanting to make as much income as possible to the exclusion of everything else, and not incur the costs of child raising; being selfish and not wanting to have to care for a child; or immaturely not wanting to take on the responsibility that good parenting requires. — Mark Driscoll

There were two movies that asked me to go to Australia or New Zealand for long periods of time. One was 'Lord of the Rings' and one was 'The Matrix.' But I was actively involved at that time raising my family, and I couldn't really take that time out. — Nicolas Cage

You can give so much in this life, and that offers you many opportunities to release the self. For example, you can give time, helpfulness, donations, restraint, patience, noncontention, and forgiveness. Any path of service - including raising a family, caring for others, and many kinds of work - incorporates generosity. Envy - and its close cousin, jealousy - is a major impediment to generosity. So notice the suffering in envy, how it is an affliction upon you. Envy actually activates some of the same neural networks involved with physical pain (Takahashi et al. 2009). In a compassionate and kind way, remind yourself that you will be all right even if other people have fame, money, or a great partner - and you don't. To free yourself from the clutches of envy, send compassion and loving-kindness to people you envy. — Rick Hanson

Because it is ignorance about money that causes so much greed and fear," said rich dad. "Let me give you some examples. A doctor, wanting more money to better provide for his family, raises his fees. By raising his fees, it makes health care more expensive for everyone. It hurts the poor people the most, so they have worse health than those with money. Because the doctors raise their fees, the attorneys raise their fees. Because the attorneys' fees have gone up, schoolteachers want a raise, which raises our taxes, and on and on and on. Soon there will be such a horrifying gap between the rich and the poor that chaos will break out and another great civilization will collapse. History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don't want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option - it isn't. — Carl Paladino

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. fears no one. But now he sleeps flat on his back in a hospital bed. His upper body is encased in plaster, the result of a car accident twelve days ago. Room 110 is a former utility closet, just fourteen feet by sixteen feet. There are no decorations, pictures on the walls, or elaborate furnishings - just the narrow bed, white walls, and a single high window. A chair has been brought in for Patton's wife, Beatrice, who endured a long, white-knuckle flight over the North Atlantic from the family home in Boston to be at his bedside. She sits there now, crochet hook moving silently back and forth, raising her eyes every few moments to see if her husband has awakened. — Bill O'Reilly

There is nothing more pathetically sad than a parent who teaches a child not to hit by spanking them. Well, that, and adults who think hitting someone will solve a problem. — Anitra Lynn McLeod

Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we're all in it together. It'll work when there's a shared sense of destiny. It can be done! — Jerry Brown

She looked at him, his soft brown eyes and tall form, and contemplated raising herself on her toes and kissing his ear, or his cheek ...
Instead, impulsively before leaving, she reached up and smoothed his mussed hair.
Mr. Bradford beamed. — Heather Dixon

I'm well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued. — Paula Hawkins

When do you have to get back?" I say, nudging him with my elbow.
I bite into the sandwich Caleb got me from the cafeteria line. I am nervous to have him here, mixing the sad remains of my family life with the sad remains of my Dauntless life. What will he think of my friends, my faction? What will my faction think of him?
"Soon," he says. "I don't want anyone to worry."
"I didn't realize Susan had changed her name to 'Anyone,'" I say, raising an eyebrow.
"Ha-ha," he says, making a face at me. — Veronica Roth

The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Not everyone is a murderer, Aaryan. There are people on this Earth who have led their entire lives without raising a finger on anyone. Why has this notion entered your mind that everyone is evil?"
"Because I have seen normal people who were leading their lives without raising a finger on anyone kill each other. Dad, we are animals. We just need a chance. We are like werewolves. We wait for the moon of hatred. — Amit Sharma

Never forget the tribulations that we have endured. We are all one energy, and we are all part of God. You are one family now. Do not allow yourselves to find reasons to separate yourselves. Share everything; help each other in raising your children. Love each other, and love life. — Aaron B. Powell

We don't all have to be in the limelight to be reaching our potential,' Jack said, keeping his voice even. 'There's something to be said for raising a family and being part of my community. — Colleen Coble

Faith, family, academics and then sports was the order of priorities in my family. My parents really stuck to these principles when raising me and my two brothers. As long as we took care of everything, they let us play as much basketball as we wanted. — Jeremy Lin

If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go. — Charles Portis

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values
or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be
to be through her son, to live through her son. — Andrea Dworkin

He said how love was the sweetest expression of life. The one thing that made life worth living. Love made difficult tasks easy. Raising a family could be a great burden, but if there was love, the sacrifice was a pleasure. And when love matured into devotion then everything you did for your lover was a joy. You would give up your life to save those you loved. On the other hand, if love did not mature it could lead to bondage, to jealousy. If you loved someone, but felt possessive of them, you could end up treating them like an object that belonged to you. Just as bad, with your children, if you showered them with too much love, and never disciplined them, they would grow up weak and spoiled. At times, love had to be tough, or it could end up wrecking those dearest to you. — Christopher Pike

I think of kids. It makes me feel selfish, to be so wary of having a family. Never mind do I have a job or not. I'll have a job soon, a good one. That's not it. I'm in awe of raising, basically, someone so tiny and soft. — Don DeLillo

My wife is so analytical with raising kids, and I am not. My feeling is if they turn out good, then that means I was a good daddy and put a lot of effort into it. If they turn out bad, it means they took after her side of the family. — Jeff Foxworthy

You don't need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don't even have to be pursuing any particular "spiritual" path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one's head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God's darkness will take. — Tim Farrington

Even harder was describing his sense that Shroom's death might have ruined him for anything else, because when he died? when I felt his soul pass through me? I loved him so much right then, I don't think I can ever have that kind of love for anybody again. So what was the point of getting married, having kids, raising a family if you knew you couldn't give them your very best love? — Ben Fountain

My parents told me they knew they made lots of mistakes raising us, but that they did their best. Most parents will say something like that at some point, and they are usually right. But I think children also do their best while being raised. Finding family "happiness" is a fine balancing act. — Torill Kove

I remember Cannae," she said, raising her head, "when we thought all was lost. Carthage had defeated us, and there were those who gave up hope. Yet we survived, by our fortitude, and by believing that we should endure. There are times, Marcus, when courage is all you have."
I looked down at the stone floor, chastened into silence by her cold, stern words. This was her way, as it had always been. It was the Roman way. Grief was an indulgence; and though she surely suffered, her suffering was for her alone. It seemed hard, but she had come from a hard family, brave men and brave women who through the generations had survived by facing down hardship and loss. Of all her long line of ancestors, she was not going to be the one to break.
And nor, I decided, was I. — Paul Waters

The whole process of raising a family is one of perfecting our own lives. That which we transmit consciously and unconsciously to our children in their rearing in the home and in the community must be the best within us. — Henry D. Moyle

I'm raising my family in The Church, and I'm proud of that. — Brandon Flowers

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, 'You're tearing up the grass'; 'We're not raising grass,' Dad would reply. 'We're raising boys.' — Harmon Killebrew

To be in love with someone and be raising a family with someone and want to make that commitment and not be able to is ludicrous, just ludicrous. — Brad Pitt

It always gave me a peculiar feeling to catch a glimpse of my parents' lives before I was born. — Robert Drewe

Virtually unable to attract new capital to the foundering enterprise, the company seized the next year on a novel approach to raising money to fund the embryonic British Empire: a lottery.
With the reluctant approval of King James and the Church of England, the Virginia Company sold lottery tickets to the public, discovering no shortage of gamers willing to hazard hard coinage for the chance to win the 01,000 grand prize, a fortune at a time when the typical working-class family scraped by on little more than a pound a month. Having begun as a corporation, Virginia had evolved into a gamblers' stake with a lively populist following back in England. — Bob Deans

As your heart goes, so goes your family! If your heart isn't right, no child raising system, rules, or gimmicks will ever work. As your heart goes, so goes your parenting! — Jim George

Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure. — Scaachi Koul

I wanted to travel with my dad to be close to him again. Having babies and raising my own family took so much of my time, I didn't have a chance to be with him very often. — Nancy Sinatra

Kids haven't changed much, but parents seem increasingly unhappy with the child raising phase of their lives. — Penelope Leach

When you're in the thick of raising your kids by yourself, you tend to keep a running list of everything you think you're doing wrong. I recommend taking a lot of family pictures as evidence to the contrary. — Connie Schultz

I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can't depend on people. "I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat," Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. "They don't care about their kids; they don't provide; they just disappear, and it's not that hard to make them go. — J.D. Vance

I love what I'm doing here but I hate being away from home. I hate it. I look forward to one day raising a family myself, and I really look forward to children but when that day comes, I don't want to be an absent dad. I'm already an absent husband. — Chuck Ragan

My favourite place is at home with my family. My career is really raising my children. I'm still waiting for clarity on the future. — Withered Hand

My children grew up with one Western parent. My husband doesn't believe in raising his voice with the kids and we don't spank. They were really raised in a half-Asian family. — Amy Chua

Make sure she can reach you 24hours a day. — Harry H. Harrison Jr.

Many people don't have the ability to be rich, because they're too lazy or they don't have the desire or the stick-to-itiveness. It's a talent. Some people have a talent for piano. Some people have a talent for raising a family. Some people have a talent for golf. I just happen to have a talent for making money. — Donald Trump

Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful. A community is a complex organism with complicated resources that grow gradually and organically. — Jane Jacobs

Do I believe in coupling? Do I believe in commitment? Do I believe in co-parenting, raising children together, having a family, and growing old with someone? I absolutely believe in all of those things. I just don't believe that you need to be married to do that. I love going to weddings, though. I do love a good wedding. — Laura Wasser

Alzheimer's is a family disease ... It requires countless hours of care, which are typically provided by family caregivers ... Wi thout professional help, it can be impossible to juggle providing that care with jobs, raising kids or just time for yourself. — Seth Rogen

My parents did a great job raising me and my two sisters. We all graduated from high school and we all graduated from college. So, to be a good representative of my family is probably my greatest accomplishment thus far. — Robert Griffin III

First and foremost comes my family and my life with Brad. We have so much joy in raising our children and teaching them about the world that nothing really compares to that. — Angelina Jolie

Mama gave birth to a hell raising heavenly son. See the doctor tried to smack me, but I smacked him back. — Tupac Shakur

Change makes us confront the great unknown. It introduces different things into our lives. Different places. Different ideas. Different people. It's all hard to accept at times, and change can often be a little scary. But if there's one fact that I've learned from raising a family, from running several businesses, from serving in Congress and now as Governor, it's that nothing has ever grown without changing. — Bob Riley

Chilled ice tea that tempered tepid summer days lathered thick with humidity. Frothy hot chocolate that cut winter's chill. Bedtime prayers that sent our fears scrambling in panicked flight. Golden bouquets of dandelions aromatically rich with the gift of summers scent. Family meals that wove yet another binding thread in and through the tapestry of those seated around the table. These are but the slightest sampling of the innumerable gifts my mother handed to this child of hers. And without them, my life would be impoverished beyond words to describe. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I have come to understand that the Lord's richest blessings are spiritual, and they often have to do with family, friends, and the gospel. He often seems to give the blessing of a special sensitivity to the influence and guidance of the Holy Spirit, especially in marriage and family matters like raising children. Such spiritual sensitivity can help us enjoy the blessings of harmony and peace in the home. — Carl B. Pratt

People who live in L.A. don't like to leave their homes because they have so much space. They have the nice kitchens and a cook and a pool. When you live in L.A., there is a sense of isolation in terms of raising a family. — Solange Knowles

The consumption of drugs has the effect of reducing men's freedom by circumscribing the range of their interests. It impairs their ability to pursue more important human aims, such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations. Very often it impairs their ability to pursue gainful employment and promotes parasitism. Moreover, far from being expanders of consciousness, most drugs severely limit it. One of the most striking characteristics of drug-takers is their intense and tedious self-absorption. — Theodore Dalrymple

The selection process has been powerful enough to produce one indisputable outcome: the family is a universal human institution ... In virtually every society into which historians or anthropologists have inquired, one finds people living together on the basis of kinship ties and having responsibility for raising children ... Even in societies where men and women have relatively unrestricted sexual access to one another beginning at an early age, marriage is still the basis for family formation. It is desired by the partners and expected by society. — James Q. Wilson

Moreover, the attempt by advocates of same-sex marriage to sever marriage from procreation is more chimerical than real.35 One would be hard-pressed to find an advocate of same-sex marriage who would accept the proposition that same-sex couples should be given the right to marry but that right does not entail a right to procreate and rear children. Were marriage and family truly severable, as the contractual view suggests, the one would not entail the other. However, advocates of same-sex marriage want it both ways. They want the contractual view of marriage plus the option of raising children. — Jean Bethke Elshtain

Recognizing that family self-sufficiency is a false myth, we also need to acknowledge that all today's families need help in raising children. The problem is not so much to reeducate parents but to make available the help they need and to give them enough power so that they can be effective advocates with and coordinators of the other forces that are bringing up their children. — Kenneth Keniston

Once we got back to the office, our graphic artist made a poster of our core values. We believed we had the power to make one another's professional dreams come true. We believed the work we did affected more than just our clients, but each other. We believed in grace over guilt and we believed anybody could become great if they were challenged within the context of a community. Suddenly we were more than a company, we were a new and better culture. Our business had become a fund-raising front for a makeshift family. — Donald Miller

There are so many ebbs and flows in life, but when you're raising small children, your family means everything. — Uma Thurman

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

He [David Foster Wallace] compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. "It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you," is what he says. — David Lipsky

Being a mother is not about 'birthing a child into the world.' Rather, it is about repeatedly 'birthing into the child' a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

As a young cavalry officer out of St-Cyr, de Mun first became acquainted with the lives and problems of the poor through the charitable work of the Society of St-Vincent de Paul in his garrison town. During the Commune, as an aide to General Galliffet, who commanded the battalion that fired on the insurgent Communards, he saw a dying man brought in on a litter. The guard said he was an "insurgent," whereupon the man, raising himself up, cried with his last strength, "No, it is you who are the insurgents!" and died. In the force of that cry directed at himself, his uniform, his family, his Church, de Mun had recognized the reason for civil war and vowed himself to heal the cleavage. He blamed the Commune on "the apathy of the bourgeois class and the ferocious hatred for society of the working class." The responsible ones, he had been told by one of the St. Vincent brothers, were "you, the rich, the great, the happy ones of life who pass by the people without seeing them." To — Barbara W. Tuchman

One thing I began to realize in my travels was that everyone I met who was truly successful - whether in business, in philanthropic work, in human rights, in government, or in raising a family - shared one common trait: they were fanatically passionate about the work they did. — Wes Moore

You know raising a family in the lifestyle of a professional athlete can be very difficult. — Robin Yount

In my own family, my mother had my sister when I was 15 and for various reasons, I was extremely involved in raising her. — Rosalind Wiseman

You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.
That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.
If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. — Adrian Tan

With the gentle force of their words, the dogged warmth of their embrace, and the assuring touch of souls softly bared, mothers are silently shaping whole societies and authoring entire cultures that sit poised on the horizon of the future. And although we ignorantly relegate such roles to some lower caste status, we would be wise to understand that the role of a mother sets the cadence of the future. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. — Tim Dorsey

Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin's sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma's brother and the Darwin siblings' joint first cousin. Another of Emma's brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family's wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte's death married Darwin's sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law's sister-in-law's husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins. — Bill Bryson

Myriam and I are both hard workers, and together we make a strong team. We found ways to make a living, educate our children, and to take care of my parents until their last days, and we managed to have fun doing it. ...The friendships we made along the way were the biggest treasure of all. — Marc Ashton

Raising kids these days is hard. I'm the second to last child in my family. I think it's tough; I have two kids, I see them and I feel like I see things in them; they awaken the inner child in you. — Gore Verbinski

When most artists walk offstage, they go to a lonely hotel room. I went home to my family. They were there before the show, during and after. It's been great. I never would have done it any other way. I wasn't gonna miss raising my kids. There was no way that was gonna happen. — Gloria Estefan

I'm not saying that if you're working at home, raising a family, that's not work. I want to disrupt the narrative around what it means to be a woman who works. The whole point of my brand is that women should be architecting the lives they want to live. — Ivanka Trump

I'm the person that I always was, but in terms of how I approach my living, I'm not the same person at all. At all. I've buried a child, I've ended a marriage, and the grandson that I was raising is now grown. My family has totally shifted. — Iyanla Vanzant

As they sang, this nondescript and indifferent street audience gazed, held by the peculiarity of such an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism and apathy of life. — Theodore Dreiser

Torkie Macleod has always regarded himself as a realist. He doesn't believe in life after death or divine reward or resurrection. He doesn't even believe in leaving a legacy, insofar as anything of that nature, good or bad, is completely insignificant to the one who is dead. Torkie's pragmatic philosophy has always been to make the most of his limited time alive, which for him means not striving for fame or riches, not ticking off a list of famous destinations, not indulging in any death-defying feats, and certainly not raising a family to "carry on his name." to Torkie Macleod, realist, life means making decent money with limited effort, hanging around with cool people, not being bossed around by anyone, and ingesting any mind-altering substance he chooses without a scintilla of shame or regret. — Anthony O'Neill

The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places. — John Howard Griffin

Though I had not seen him for months, it was only then that I felt Mr. Pirzada's absence. It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months. He had no reason to return to us, and my parents predicted, correctly, that we would never see him again. Since January, each night before bed, I had continued to eat, for the sake of Mr. Pirzada's family, a piece of candy I had saved from Halloween. That night there was no need to. Eventually, I threw them away. — Anonymous

YEARS AGO I WORKED ON A GOVERNMENT TASK force studying fatherhood and healthy families. As we met in DC, I learned one of the main causes of the breakdown of the American family was the Industrial Revolution. When men left their homes and farms to work on assembly lines, they disconnected their sense of worth from the well-being of their wives and children and began to associate it with efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. While the Industrial Revolution served the world in terrific ways, it was also a mild tragedy in our social evolution. Raising healthy children became a woman's job. Food was no longer grown in the backyard, it was bought at a store with money earned from the necessary separation of the father. Within a few generations, then, intimacy in family relationships began to be monopolized by females. — Donald Miller

Amid the joy of raising children will be some of the hardest work you'll ever do. — Elizabeth George

I don't think my grandmother would ever be convinced, but my family was convinced that I was convinced, and actually, they came around. My mother ended up going to fundraisers in Chicago that were raising money to send to the students in the South and actually, over years, she went to an elevated train bus station one day at 6:00 a.m. to hand out leaflets protesting the war. — Diane Nash

Businesswomen are fine. But they shouldn't be forced to pay for the raising of the family. It's the husband's job. That's the way I see it. — Cat Stevens

Make dads the godly leaders [of the family] with the women in submission, raising kids for the glory of God. — Randall Terry

I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has. — Amy Bloom

Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge made that critical leap from 'be afraid' to 'be very afraid,' raising the terrorist threat level to orange for financial sectors in New York, Washington, D.C., and northern New Jersey ... Ridge's announcement comes amidst reports he will step down as head of homeland security after the election. Ridge himself has refused to comment on the story, though colleagues say he has often expressed a desire to spend more time at home, scaring his family. — Jon Stewart

The State is now more involved than it has ever been in the raising of children, and children are now more neglected, abused, and mistreated than they have been in our time. This is not a coincidence, and, with all due respect, I am here to tell you: It does not take a village to raise a child-it takes a family. — Bob Dole

One of a mother's greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water's edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

He's as ambivalent about raising a family as I am, but he'll do it because I asked him to. And until now, I tried convincing myself that it was the praiseworthy decision.
But is it the right choice for the babies? For Ram?
For me?
But I'm not supposed to think about what's best for me, am I? — Megan McCafferty

A parent holds within their hands the gift of a child to which they must expend the gift of themselves. And in such a monumental outpouring, the parent will lose both the child and the gifts given, but they will possess the far greater gift of knowing that they gave both. — Craig D. Lounsbrough