What makes a good father?
A hundred years ago, Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church one Sunday when she came up with the idea of a national Father's Day on the order of Mother's Day. It took 57 years before President Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966 making it the national holiday we celebrate today. Before and since, much has been said about fathers and fatherhood, the good and the bad, and we thought it appropriate to offer you a sampling. Perhaps you'll find a description that fits your own father, or, for the men, the father you are today:
"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."
-- Mario Cuomo
"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular." --Robert Frost
"A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station."
-- Bill Cosby
"A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma."
-- Marlene Dietrich
"Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes." --Euripedes
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
"My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it." -- Natasha Josefowitz
"The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan." -- Garrison Keillor
"My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it." -- Clarence Budington Kelland
"When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, 'Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?' He answered, 'If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you.'" -- Jerry Lewis
"Honor thy father and thy mother." -- Matthew 19:19
"Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance." -- Ruth E. Renkel
"An angry father is most cruel towards himself."
-- Publilius Syrus
"A man's children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season." --Unknown
"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."
-- Charles Wadsworth
"My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, 'You're tearing up the grass.' 'We're not raising grass,' Dad would reply. 'We're raising boys.'" -- Harmon Killebrew
"A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be." -- Unknown
"Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected." -- Red Buttons
"Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life."
-- Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Fathers come in all shapes and sizes and with all varying temperaments. A father’s love is different than a mother’s love but just as important or just as damaging, if withheld. If you are lucky enough to have a father… whether he is your birth father, adoptive father, step-father or guardian who loves you and is really there for you, you start life with a big step ahead of those who didn’t. Make sure you take the time to thank him and to honor him in your heart.
--Marion Algier, Daily Thought Pad
Source: The Salt Lake Tribune - Tribune Editorial Updated: 06/19/2009 07:25:51 PM MDT - Posted: Fox Nation
On Huckabee this weekend the former governor and presidential candidate spoke of a prison program where each of the prisoners could have a free card to mail their Mothers for Mother’s Day. The participation was overwhelming and almost every prisoner requested, wrote and mailed their mother a card. So, the powers that be at the prison decided to repeat the program for Father’s Day; almost nobody requested or mailed their father a card. Correlation between missing or negative father-child relations and being in prison…? I’d put money on it!! Children thrive in positive families with a loving father and a loving mother, or at least in situations where both a father-figure and mother-figure are involved in their lives. Are there exceptions… of course there are, but why play the odds with your children’s future if you can help it ?!? M~
Posted: Daily Thought Pad
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