Parenting & Family Quote by Dennis Banks

It reads like simple fatherly advice until you notice how aggressively it rewrites the script of masculinity. “Every man should” is deliberately blunt: not “might,” not “if he can,” but a moral obligation. Banks isn’t romanticizing childbirth; he’s conscripting men into a moment culture has long treated as women’s territory and men’s optional cameo. The line’s force comes from its plainness. No metaphor, no flourish, just a demand that presence counts as responsibility.

The subtext is about accountability. If you can witness the blood-and-sweat mechanics of new life, you lose the convenient distance that lets fatherhood become abstract: a paycheck, a last name, a paternal role you step into later when the hard parts are over. Seeing birth makes the cost of creation undeniable, and it quietly indicts the social habits that let men remain spectators to women’s labor, both biological and domestic. It’s also a push against the old stoic pose: the idea that men should stay outside the room because they’ll faint, interfere, or “not handle it.” Banks suggests that “handling it” starts with staying.

Context matters because Banks is an Indigenous activist and community leader as much as an educator. Read through that lens, the quote isn’t only about individual bonding; it’s about restoring relational responsibility in societies shaped by disruption, forced separation, and systems that have often fractured families. The insistence on witnessing becomes political: show up at the beginning, or don’t pretend you understand what comes after.