The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see aroundthem so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future--fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.
Lillian B. RubinThe depth of a friendship - how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.
Lillian B. RubinFor those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.
Lillian B. RubinThe structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.
Lillian B. RubinHow then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?
Lillian B. RubinPersonal change, growth, development, identity formation--these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events--a job, a mate, a child--through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.
Lillian B. Rubin