Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

It is impossible for any woman to love her children twenty-four hours a day

The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction.

We never make sport of religion, politics, race, or mothers. A mother never gets hit with a custard pie. Mothers-in-law-yes. But mothers-never.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.

Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols-all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child's authentic self to a parent s needs.

Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country.