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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.

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
Lasts
Possibility
Last
Generations
Values
Accepting
Faith
Parents
Adapt
Jobs
Question
Explore
System
Possibilities
Parent
Generation
Age
Accept

More quotes by Frank Pittman

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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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Parents have to get over the idea that their children belong just to them children are a family affair.
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Fathering makes a man, whatever his standing in the eyes of the world, feel strong and good and important, just as he makes his child feel loved and valued.
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A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.
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Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.
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To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of the male bonding.
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Becoming Father the Nurturer rather than just Father the Provider enables a man to fully feel and express his humanity and his masculinity. Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.
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Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.
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Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity.
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Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes.
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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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Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.
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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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No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him.
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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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When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility.
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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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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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Men who have been raised violently have every reason to believe it is appropriate for them to control others through violence they feel no compunction over being violent to women, children, and one another.
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