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The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent.

Frank Pittman

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Frank Pittman
Age: 77 †
Born: 1935
Born: January 1
Died: 2012
Died: November 24
Psychiatrist
Psychotherapist
the United States of America
Products
Parent
Child
Ends
Children
Fathering
Raising
Product

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There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.
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Our father has an even more important function than modeling manhood for us. He is also the authority to let us relax the requirements of the masculine model: if our father accepts us, then that declares us masculine enough to join the company of men. We, in effect, have our diploma in masculinity and can go on to develop other skills.
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For most people, a life lived alone, with passing strangers or passing lovers, is incoherent and ultimately unbearable. Someone must be there to know what we have done for those we love.
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Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.
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The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.
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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.
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When the masculine mystique is pulling boys and men out into the world to growl manly noises at one another, the only power with astronger pull on the male psyche is maternally induced guilt. The guilt is quite necessary for our moral development, but it is often uncomfortable.
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We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life?
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Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity.
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Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.
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When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility.
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If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there.
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Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.
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Infidelity flows from a belief that women have the power to make you feel like a man if you only find a woman that thinks you're perfect if you can only find a woman that you haven't hurt or disappointed yet.
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Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.
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Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.
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Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel.
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Character, not passion keeps marriages together long enough to do their work of raising children into mature, responsible, productive citizens.
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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.
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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.
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