Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem.... The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women.

Parents sometimes think of newborns as helpless creatures, but in fact parents' behavior is much more under the infant's control than the reverse. Does he come running when you cry?

Parents ought to feel more comfortable about the care of their children than some experts would seem to permit. If children were so fragile and parenting so difficult to learn, where would we all be as adults?

Babies learn most of what they know from interactions with their parents, but not of the formal, instructional variety. Babies learn from spontaneous, everyday events--the mailman at the door with a package to open...all of which need adult interpretation. They are real events of interest and concern to babies and young children....By contrast, infant education is artificial and out of context.

Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differencesrather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second.

All we know is that the school achievement, IQ test score, and emotional and social development of working mothers' children are every bit as good as that of children whose mothers do not work.

It is important for practical and psychological reasons to call any reasonably stable group that rears children a family.... The advantage of this view is that traditional and nontraditional families can all be seen to serve the interests of children. Children can also feel comfortable with an approved family form, even if it is not traditional.