The process of becoming an empathetic, autonomous adult--through all the wondrous and exhilarating and challenging, even painful, ...transitions of emotional growth in childhood--is not unlike learning to walk; each step makes you stronger for the next one. But if your parent is doing the walking for you, you do not have the muscles even to support your own emotional weight. You cannot stand alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But one of the great misconceptions of modern life is the assumption that by the magic age of twenty-one we are jelled, dreams in ...place, ready to tackle the adult world and leave childhood behind. All we lack, according to this myth, is experience. The reality is that many of us lack quite a bit more: a psychic passport to adulthood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Depression era generation of mothers, reared on the values of flag, Mom, and apple pie, believed in self-sacrifice and commitm...ent to others. For them, the worst fate was to be independent: a spinster, or married to a man who couldn't support his family on his salary alone, and have to work. Their daughters, jolted by Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and feminism, were largely committed to themselves. For them, the worst fate was to be dependent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether our relationship is strained or easy, hostile or amiable, we need [our mother] if only in memory or fantasy, to conjugate ...our history, validate our femaleness, and guide our way. We need to know she's there if we stumble, to love us no matter what, to nurture the child that resides within us even now without infantalizing us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all the stereotypes of parenthood, one of the most destructive is the assumption that all mothers are cut out for Donna Reed ki...nd of maternal love and that fathers are biologically incapable of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a father gives his daughter an emotional visa to strike out on her own, he is always with her. Such a daughter has her encour...aging, understanding daddy in her head, cheering her on--not simply as a woman but as a whole, unique human being with unlimited possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is from her father that she begins to infer messages that will linger a lifetime--"I am, or am not, considered by men to be pre...tty, desirable, valuable, dependent, weak, strong, dim-witted, brilliant"; "Men are, or are not, trustworthy, loving, predatory, dependable, available, dangerous."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The daughters of distant fathers, when they're little, don't know about biology and cultural bias and incest taboos and gender rol...e and economic downturns and all the buzz words of sociological, anthropological and psychological mitigation. All they know is that Daddy isn't there as much as Mommy . . . Daddy is simply the silent partner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Middle age is a period when a man, for the first time, may be plumbing his "feminine" side--the part that cries easily at movies, ...that needs to hold tenderly and to be held by the people he most loves, the part that is aware of his emotional losses. In a way he may be making room for the daddy he never was, the daddy he now longs to be--and the daddy he may never have had.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A father is available to help his daughter balance both her love and her anger toward her mother, to moderate the inevitable emoti...onal extremes in the intense mother-daughter equation. With Daddy's steadying influence daughters can learn to be comfortable with healthy anger, rather than feeling that they must be eternal good girls who must at all costs conceal it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »