Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Howard Clark

Clark lands the punch by pairing two things we’re trained to treat as fundamentally different: a child and a stomach. The comparison is deliberately abrasive, and that’s the point. It yanks parenting out of the soft-focus realm of sentiment and drops it into the blunt logic of appetite. Your stomach doesn’t care about your paycheck; it cares about capacity. Give it more than it needs and you don’t create health, you create harm. Clark’s intent is to drag that same principle into childrearing: “afford” is a dangerous metric for “should.”

The subtext is a critique of status-driven generosity. Money (and the comforts it buys) can masquerade as love, competence, even virtue. If you can provide everything, why wouldn’t you? Clark implies the trap: abundance becomes a parenting style. Too many gifts, too much protection, too many options, too much intervention. The child, like the stomach, has limits - not just physical, but psychological and moral. Overfeeding a kid with things, attention, or rescue can dull hunger for effort, distort expectations, and turn resilience into entitlement.

Contextually, the line fits a mid-century American anxiety about prosperity: the post-scarcity fear that comfort would produce softness. It also quietly rebukes consumer culture’s pitch that more is always better, especially for families. The elegance is in the economics of it: he doesn’t argue against giving; he argues against confusing capacity with care. The best parenting, Clark suggests, is less about maximizing what you can offer and more about calibrating what actually nourishes.