1989 Ron Howard-directed movie about family relationships

Usage examples of parenthood.

It is not the individual as individual, but the individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or the individual in whom it has never appeared.

Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but, in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility.

Our primary purpose throughout being practical, it is impossible to devote unlimited time and space to proceeding formally through the known forms of life in order to marshal all the proofs or a tithe of them, that all individuals are invented and tolerated by Nature for parenthood or its service.

It is our business, I repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred thing in life.

We shall argue that, in the case of mankind, and pre-eminently in the case of woman, this enrichment and development of the individual life is best and most surely attained by parenthood or foster-parenthood, made self-conscious and provident, and magnificently transmuted by its extension and amplification upon the psychical plane in the education of children and, indeed, the care and ennoblement of human life in all its stages.

The chief obstacle in the way of this ideal is Anglo-Saxon prudery, and, perhaps, the reader will not be persuaded that education for parenthood is our greatest educational need to-day, more especially for girls, until he or she has been persuaded of the magnitude of the preventable evils which flow from our present neglect of this matter.

This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but not perhaps much the worse for that.

One may notice a teacher of zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood would have served his turn.

Thus it is possible to speak of physical parenthood and of psychical parenthood, and thus not only to avoid the term reproduction, but to get better value out of its substitutes.

Grundy can tolerate the idea of parenthood, reproduction she cannot away with.

Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about sex and parenthood which is inherently base and unclean.

Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean, and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.

Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now be made to return.

When such blasphemies pass for the best pedagogic wisdom, to preach parenthood as the goal of all worthy education is to run the risk of being looked upon as ridiculous.

Let us, then, make parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring.