Quote of the Day: Arnold H. Glasow on Nature & Animals

It’s a humid July evening and you’re standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open, rehearsing your calmest voice. The teenager across from you is half-listening, half-scrolling, offering the kind of nod that means “I heard sounds” rather than “I absorbed meaning.” You try the careful speech, choices, consequences, the world outside this house, and watch it slide off like rain on wax. That’s when the line lands with a splash: “Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath.”

The joke works because it stings. A fish doesn’t need what you’re offering; it already lives in the element you’re treating as foreign. Teenagers, too, are immersed in a reality adults can forget: a daily flood of firsts, first embarrassments, first loyalties, first heartbreaks, where experience is their primary teacher, not your lecture.

Glasow’s metaphor also indicts the adult impulse to sanitize life for someone else. We package “the facts” as if they’re a transferable file: download, install, behave accordingly. But adolescence runs on friction. Wisdom arrives less like instruction and more like bruise, apology, risk, and repair. The better move is not to stop speaking, but to change the medium, stories instead of sermons, questions instead of verdicts, boundaries instead of panic. That’s leadership at home: guiding without grabbing the wheel.

As both businessman and satirist, Arnold H. Glasow made a career out of noticing how humans resist the obvious, even when it’s delivered with good intentions. His wit isn’t cynicism; it’s a tool for clearer sight.

On a Friday in July, when families are together more and tempers run warmer, apply the line as a reset: trade the bath for better water. Offer presence, not performance; patience, not prophecy; humor instead of control.