The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around... them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future--fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Personal change, growth, development, identity formation--these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescenc...e alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events--a job, a mate, a child--through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She has problems with separation; he has trouble with unity--problems that make themselves felt in our relationships with our chil...dren just as they do in our relations with each other. She pulls for connection; he pushes for separateness. She tends to feel shut out; he tends to feel overwhelmed and intruded upon. It's one of the reasons why she turns so eagerly to children--especially when they're very young.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breas...t, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model--the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's true, as Marya Mannes says: "No one believes [a woman's] time to be sacred. A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is... a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women find ways to give sense and meaning to daily life--ways to be useful in the community, to keep mind active and soul growing ...even while they change diapers and cook vegetables.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, the... seeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Contrary to all we hear about women and their empty-nest problem, it may be fathers more often than mothers who are pained by the ...children's imminent or actual departure--fathers who want to hold back the clock, to keep the children in the home for just a little longer. Repeatedly women compare their own relief to their husband's distressLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children crawl before they walk, walk before they run--each generally a precondition for the other. And with each step they take t...oward more independence, more mastery of the environment, their mothers take a step away--each a small separation, a small distancing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woma...n--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »