the evening rituals

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit.  No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child.  He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.  ~Pearl S. Buck

I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
-- Anais Nin

Bringing up a family should be an adventure, not an anxious discipline in which everybody is constantly graded for performance -Milton R Saperstein  

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements. -Elizabeth II