quotes tagged with 'mothers' 
Where there is a really great man, there was first a good mother.
The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families....How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?
"We shall prosper and build up Zion upon the earth; for this is our mission, and the work of your mothers and daughters of Zion—the mothers now, and by and by the daughters, who will, in turn, be mothers in Israel. Great responsibility rests upon you. Upon you depend the training and the direction of the thoughts and the inspiration of the hearts of your children, for they drink into the spirit of their mothers, and the influence of the mother over the children is the most enduring impression that can be made. There is nothing so imperishable as the influence of the mother; that is when she is good and has the spirit of the Gospel in her heart, and she has brought up her children in the way they should go."
A home should have a cookie jar for when it is half past three
And children hurry home from school as hungry as can be,
there is nothing quite so splendid in filling children up,
As spicy, fluffy ginger cakes and sweet milk in a cup.
A home should have a mother waiting with a hug,
No matter what a boy brings home---a puppy or a bug,
For children only loiter when the bell rings to dismiss,
If no one is home to greet them with a cookie and a kiss.
“A housewife’s work … is the one for which all others exist.”
Women as 'nurturers and teachers'
Granddaughters, do not be deceived in your quest to find happiness and an identity of your own. Entreating voices may tell you that what you have experienced in your own homes—that which you have seen your mothers and grandmothers do—is old-fashioned, unchallenging, boring, and drudgery. It may be old-fashioned and perhaps routine; at times it is drudgery. But your mothers and grandmothers have sung a song that expresses the highest love and the noblest of womanly feelings. They have been nurturers and teachers.
The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.
“This study makes it clear that it is not just quality that matters,” said Jay Belsky (University of London), one of the study’s principal authors, who helped set off the debate in 1986 with a paper suggesting that nonparental child care could cause developmental problems...
"What the findings tell me is that we need to pay as much attention to children’s social and emotional development as we do to their cognitive, academic development, especially when they are together in groups,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group.
To begin with, we can decide to plan for success, not for failure. Statistics are thrown at us every day to persuade us that a family composed of a loving father and mother with children loved, taught, and cared for in the way the proclamation enjoins is going the way of the dinosaurs, toward extinction. You have enough evidence in your own families that righteous people sometimes have their families ripped apart by circumstances beyond their control. It takes courage and faith to plan for what God holds before you as the ideal rather than what might be forced upon you by circumstances.
There are important ways in which planning for failure can make failure more likely and the ideal less so. Consider these twin commandments as an example: "Fathers are to . . . provide the necessities of life . . . for their families" and "mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children." Knowing how hard that might be, a young man might choose a career on the basis of how much money he could make, even if it meant he couldn't be home enough to be an equal partner. By doing that, he has already decided he cannot hope to do what would be best. A young woman might prepare for a career incompatible with being primarily responsible for the nurture of her children because of the possibilities of not marrying, of not having children, or of being left alone to provide for them herself. Or she might fail to focus her education on the gospel and knowledge of the world that nurturing a family would require, not realizing that the highest and best use she could make of her talents and her education would be in her home. Because a young man and woman had planned to take care of the worst, they might make the best less likely.