Ezra Taft Benson

I say to all of you the Lord has charged men with the responsibility to provide for their families in such a way that the wife is allowed to fulfill her role as mother in the home.

Second, you have a sacred responsibility to provide spiritual leadership in your family.

Mothers play an important role as the heart of the home, but this in no way lessons the equally important role fathers should play, as head of the home, in nurturing, training and loving their children.

As the patriarch in your home, you have a serious responsibility to assume leadership in working with your children.  You must help create a home where the Spirit of the Lord can abide.  Your place is to give direction to all family life.  You should take an active part in establishing family rules and discipline.

Ezra Taft Benson, General Conference, October 1987

James E. Faust

The depth of the love of parents for their children cannot be measured. It is like no other relationship. It exceeds concern for life itself. The love of a parent for a child is continuous and transcends heartbreak and disappointment. All parents hope and pray that their children will make wise decisions. Children who are obedient and responsible bring to their parents unending pride and satisfaction.

James E. Faust
April 2003

E. T. Sullivan

When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way.  He doesn't stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts.  Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home of some obscure mother.  And then God puts the idea into the mother's heart, and she puts it in the baby's mind. And then God waits.  The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts.  The greatest forces in the world are babies.

In Charles L. Wallis, ed., The Treasure Chest (1965), 53. as quoted by Gordon B. Hinckley, “These, Our Little Ones,” Ensign, Dec 2007, 4–9"

Sheri Dew

No woman who understands the gospel would ever think that any other work is more important or would ever say, “I am just a mother,” for mothers heal the souls of men… And if the day comes when we are the only women on earth who find nobility and divinity in motherhood, so be it. For mother is the word that will define a righteous woman made perfect in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom, a woman who has qualified for eternal increase in posterity, wisdom, joy, and influence.

Sheri Dew, “Are We Not All Mothers?,” Ensign, Nov 2001, 96

James E Faust

Women today are encouraged by some to have it all: money, travel, marriage, motherhood, and separate careers in the world. For women, the important ingredients for happiness are to forge an identity, serve the Lord, get an education, develop your talents, serve your family, and if possible to have a family of your own.

However, you cannot do all these things well at the same time. You cannot eat all of the pastries in the baking shop at once. You will get a tummyache. You cannot be a 100-percent wife, a 100-percent mother, a 100-percent Church worker, a 100-percent career person, and a 100-percent public-service person at the same time. How can all of these roles be coordinated? I suggest that you can have it sequentially. ... I would encourage you sisters to develop all of your gifts and talents to move forward the work of righteousness in the earth.

James E. Faust, “How Near to the Angels,” Ensign, May 1998, 95