Quote

In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives.

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
Lives
Equal
Considering
Given
Gets
Compare
Give
Parents
Raise
Giving
Greatest
Raises
Children
Parent
Degree
Things
Child
Degrees
Ledger
Opportunity
Gift
Experiencing
Understand
Meaning
Raising

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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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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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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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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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Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.
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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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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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Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.
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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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The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent.
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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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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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Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.
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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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. . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.
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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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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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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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