America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.
Letty Cottin PogrebinThe risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.
Letty Cottin PogrebinMuch is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin