I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head.

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

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

The 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.