Warren Farrell Children Quotations

I don't have children that I've lost in a bitter custody dispute. But I see an enormous wound in kids due to a lack of their dads.

The male corporate model is built on a mans greater willingness to be a slave of sorts - especially once he has to provide for children.

One can make a case that says that since 85% of children being brought up in single family homes are being brought up by women that about 85% of elementary school teachers should be males to balance out the feminization that the boys and girls receive.

Without children, men have more liberty to earn less - that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies.

You can't ask a company to subsidize you being at home with children and still expect to work for a company that will be tops in its field for 20 to 30 years, ... Why Men Earn More.

In a sense, in the area of child care, children's relationships with parents' working has come full circle. We have gone from the mom-and-pop store (or mom-and-pop farm), with its integration of child care and work, to children-at-home and dad-at-work; to the mom-plus-daddy working at home, with its integration of childcare and work again. From mom-and-pop back to mom-and-pop.

Raising children was not designed for single parents. (Which is why divorce was such a taboo prior to birth control).

The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark.

Feminists often discuss women having two jobs: work and children. True. But no one discusses those divorced and remarried men who have three jobs: work, and two sets of children to nurture and financially support.

When a government requires a man to support a child he was tricked into creating, that government subsidizes fraud. No. It is worse than that: It subsidizes the woman using a man's body for 18-21 years without his consent.

When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.

Our love for children is so immediate in part because we feel their powerlessness immediately; conversely, part of the way we deny our love for men is by denying men's powerlessness. Too often we have confused love for men with respect for them, especially for their power to take care of us---which is really just love for ourselves.

Both parents' rights must be in balance so children can grow up with a balance between both parents.

We have restricted humans from giving 'free' food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is 'free feeding'.

Industrialization created the Father's Catch-22:;: a dad loving his children by being away from the love of his children.

Programs like WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) subsidize the exclusion of dads.

Survey 2001: Men who never married, never had a child, worked full time and were college educated earn only 85% of what women with the same criteria earn.

[With respect to child custody] a woman has no right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a man's life any more than a man would have the right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a woman's life.

The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother's time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours... It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.

When a parent denies a child its parent time, that parent is denying the child its child support -- its psychological child support.

At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom.

By starving our children of men, we have made them more vulnerable to the very abuse we are trying to prevent.

Since no one is always right, always being right is really a role model for his children feeling inadequate.

Visitation reflects the era of the absentee father; parent time influences the re-emergence of the involved father. Visitation reflects the destruction of the family; parent time influences the reconstruction of the family. Parent time influences an era that understands that as either parents loses, so lose the children.

The deeper purpose of a more positive attitude toward men is a better life for the children who are parented by the men who are their dads and stepdads; less shame for our sons who will become men; and, for our daughters, a deeper understanding of men's desire to please that leaves them feeling their willingness to please is not unrequited but returned--allowing our daughters to feel less lonely and more loved. If we earn more and love less, we pay for a home in which we do not live.

Here's the pay paradox that Why Men Earn More explains: Men earn more money, therefore men have more power; and men earn more money, therefore men have less power (earning more money as an obligation, not an option). The opposite is true for women: Women earn less money, therefore women have less power; and women earn less money, therefore women have more power (the option to raise children, or to not take a hazardous job).

After a divorce, men's biggest fear is, typically, losing their children (women's is poverty).

When we commit violence against an infant girl, we call it child abuse; when we commit violence against an infant boy, we call it circumcision.

When a dad admits he is wrong or asks for help, he allows the child to see him- or herself as adequate even when she or he is also wrong. It encourages children to make suggestions and, therefore, to discover their creativity because they have a chance of making a contribution.

Our children are better served by speaking not of visitation versus custody, but of parent time.

If we hold the married man accountable for finances gone legally awry, then the married woman should be held accountable for children who go awry.

The more the father is involved, the more easily the child makes open, receptive, and trusting contact with new people in its life.

Is a man's body at stake? Any time a man is asked to work to pay child support, he is using his body, his time, his life -- not for nine months, but for a minimum of 18 to 21 years. So the motto of the feminist with integrity is, It's a woman's and man's right to choose because it is a woman's and man's body at stake.

The irony of primary parent laws is that on the one hand feminists were arguing for women's equal rights to jointly-created career assets that emanated from the male financial womb, but arguing against men's equal rights to jointly-created children that emanated from the woman's child-bearing womb.

Teaching the child to treat boundaries seriously teaches the child to respect the rights and needs of others. Thinking of another's needs creates empathy.

Just as women needed the help of the law to enter the workplace in the 20th century, men will need the help of the law to love their children in the 21st century.

It is important for a father who feels pushed away [by the mom] to say, in effect, When you do that, I feel unwanted as a father, or I feel my rough-housing is not bad parenting; it's my contribution to helping our child take risks. Women cannot hear what men do not say.