Quote of the Day: Franklin P. Jones on Parenting & Family

If you’ve been asking for a gentle nudge to become steadier, at home, at work, and inside your own mind, let this wry insight be your permission slip. “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”

Children don’t just need our guidance; they expose our defaults. They move through the world with boundless curiosity, unpredictable timing, and a talent for turning “simple” tasks into small epics. And that’s the point: they reveal whether our patience is a practiced skill or a fragile mood that depends on everything going our way.

The practical takeaway is to treat those moments as training, not interruptions. When the questions stack up, when the shoes still aren’t on, when “one more story” becomes three, notice the early signals of impatience (tight jaw, rushed voice, bargaining). Then choose a response you can repeat: slow your pace, lower your tone, and offer one clear next step. Patience grows through reps, and those reps build resilience you can carry into meetings, commutes, and hard conversations.

As a celebrated American satirist and journalist, Franklin P. Jones made a career of compressing human nature into sharp, useful one-liners, humor that lands because it’s true.

Today, pick one predictable “kid-pressure” moment and pre-decide your script: three deep breaths, a five-second pause, and a single calm instruction, then follow through with steady kindness. May your patience become a practice you’re proud to repeat, one ordinary moment at a time.