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

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

It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.

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.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

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.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.