Parenting & Family Quote by Cathy Guisewite

Parenthood gets skewered here with the gentlest possible blade: affection sharpened into delusion, then redeemed as prophecy. Guisewite, a cartoonist who built a career translating domestic life into punchlines, knows the family dynamic that never stops being funny because it never stops being true. The joke isn’t that parents are irrational; it’s that their irrationality is a kind of engine.

The first move is universalizing: "All parents" is an overreach on purpose, the classic comic setup that invites you to nod along before you can object. Then she flips the power relationship. We spend adolescence and a good chunk of adulthood trying to be seen accurately - insisting on our limits, our cynicism, our competence. Parents, meanwhile, stubbornly refuse to update the file. That "no matter how hard we’ve tried to prove them wrong" lands because it’s petty and tender at once: we’re not just falling short, we’re actively trying to puncture the myth, and they won’t let us.

The subtext is that parental belief is less a judgment than a commitment. It’s not evidence-based; it’s covenant-based. That’s why the final twist works: "they're probably right" turns annoyance into reluctant gratitude. Guisewite isn’t claiming parents have magical insight; she’s implying that being loved with that much confidence quietly expands the possible. In a culture that fetishizes realism and self-protection, the line argues for a different kind of irrationality - one that, maddeningly, sometimes pays off.