Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

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

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.