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.

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

Family love can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it out for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.

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.

The men who are messing up their lives, their families, and their world in their quest to feel man enough are not exercising truemasculinity, but a grotesque exaggeration of what they think a man is. When we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven't been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren't being manly enough.

No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him.

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.