Parenting & Family Quote by Russell Lynes

Russell Lynes, the midcentury essayist of taste and social nuance, turns parental expectations upside down with a wry paradox. Adults often confuse appreciation with preservation: the child who keeps a toy pristine is judged well-mannered, grateful, mature. Lynes suggests the opposite. The gift that truly lands is the one immediately subjected to the storms of curiosity and delight. Break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death compresses a whole anthropology of childhood into four verbs: the experimenter who pushes limits until something snaps, the wanderer whose treasures vanish in play, the innocent vandal who baptizes newness in mud, and the tactile devotee who loves by wearing a thing out.

At the core is a redefinition of value. For a child, objects are not museum pieces; they are invitations. A successful gift is not admired from a distance but absorbed into the body and the imagination. Rapid wear is evidence of use, and use is evidence of love. The hyperbole of within a matter of minutes captures both the velocity of childhood and the parental gasp that accompanies it. It is humor edged with insight: what adults call care may be, from the child’s view, indifference.

Lynes made a career noting how taste polices behavior, and there is a sly critique here of status-conscious gifting. If the purpose of a present is to display refinement or costliness, the child will reliably frustrate that purpose. If the purpose is to spark wonder, destruction becomes a kind of success metric. The line also nods to consumer culture’s cycle of novelty and obsolescence, though it redeems the cycle by rooting it in genuine engagement rather than mere fashion.

The broader lesson reaches beyond childhood. Things fulfill their purpose in being used up by the lives they serve. Gratitude can be noisy, messy, and short on ceremony, yet it is unmistakable in the intensity of attention.