Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon--the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.

Illness is the proving ground of friendship.