Each generation’s job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation’s system of values for a new age.

A man doesn’t have to have all the answers; children will teach him how to parent them, and in the process will teach him everything he needs to know about life.

We perversely see mother love as the problem – when it is all we have to sustain us – rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much.

When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It’s an awesome responsibility.

The most likely cause of a man’s depression is his failure to be the man he thinks he should be.

Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.

The guys who fear becoming fathers don’t understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child-raising is not the child but the parent.

Common courtesy plays a big role in happy marriages. People who are permanently married are polite to one another. They don’t want to hurt one another’s feelings, and they don’t try to make the other one feel humiliated. People who are married for life are extremely kind to one another.

Bad marriages don’t cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.

All those tough guys who want to scare the world into seeing them as men . . . who don't know how to be a man with a woman, only abrute or a boy, who fill up the divorce courts; all those corporate raiders and rain-forest burners and war starters who want more in hopes that will make them feel better; . . . are suffering from Father Hunger. They go through their puberty rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and say "Attaboy," to treat them as good enough to be considered a man.