"A new baby is like the beginning of all things - wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities"
About this Quote
Eda J. Le Shan frames the arrival of a baby as less a domestic milestone than a soft reset button for the adult imagination. The line works because it refuses the practical realities everyone knows are coming - sleepless nights, money stress, identity shift - and instead treats infancy as a symbolic opening, a “beginning of all things.” That deliberate overreach is the point: it gives parents and communities permission to feel something larger than logistics.
The construction is devotional but not religious. The dash acts like a cinematic cut, zooming from the concrete (“a new baby”) to an abstract montage: “wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities.” Each noun is airy and unburdened, and “dream” is the key word; it admits this is partly projection. Adults are not just welcoming a child, they’re reinstalling narrative: the belief that the future can be authored, that history isn’t finished, that someone new might escape the scripts we’ve inherited.
Le Shan, known for writing about children and family psychology, is speaking from a mid-to-late 20th-century culture that increasingly treated parenting as both emotional fulfillment and personal growth project. The subtext is reassuring and aspirational: even if your life feels stalled, a baby reintroduces motion. It also subtly recruits the reader into responsibility. If a newborn embodies possibility, then the surrounding world becomes accountable for not crushing it. The quote is comforting, yes, but it smuggles in a moral claim: beginnings deserve protection, attention, and imagination.
The construction is devotional but not religious. The dash acts like a cinematic cut, zooming from the concrete (“a new baby”) to an abstract montage: “wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities.” Each noun is airy and unburdened, and “dream” is the key word; it admits this is partly projection. Adults are not just welcoming a child, they’re reinstalling narrative: the belief that the future can be authored, that history isn’t finished, that someone new might escape the scripts we’ve inherited.
Le Shan, known for writing about children and family psychology, is speaking from a mid-to-late 20th-century culture that increasingly treated parenting as both emotional fulfillment and personal growth project. The subtext is reassuring and aspirational: even if your life feels stalled, a baby reintroduces motion. It also subtly recruits the reader into responsibility. If a newborn embodies possibility, then the surrounding world becomes accountable for not crushing it. The quote is comforting, yes, but it smuggles in a moral claim: beginnings deserve protection, attention, and imagination.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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