Parenting is a profoundly reciprocal process: we, the shapers of our children's lives, are also being shaped. As we struggle to beparents, we are forced to encounter ourselves; and if we are willing to look at what is happening between us and our children, we may learn how we came to be who we are.

Not only do our wives need support, but our children need our deep involvement in their lives. If this period [the early years] ofprimitive needs and primitive caretaking passes without us, it is lost forever. We can be involved in other ways, but never again on this profoundly intimate level.

Marriage is going to be that happy state in which we get all of the nurturance and care and love and empathy and even good advice that we didn't receive from our families.

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.

We are intensely loyal to our parents. In spite of the pain we experienced at our parent's hands, we cling tenaciously to their views of life; and their examples of what it is to be a man or a woman follow us throughout life. Acknowledging the power of our loyalty to them, and especially our loyalty to our same-sex parent, is only the beginning of our journey to improve upon their model; but it is at least a first step.

Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.

The ubiquitous and acutely conscious presence of our adolescents is a major problem, especially since much of their consciousnessseems to be focused on sexuality--ours and theirs. They expect us to ignore them if they are kissing their dates in the family room; but let us so much as wink at one another, and they whistle loudly.