Parenting & Family Quote by Lara St. John

There is a quiet provocation in the way Lara St. John frames authority: she doesn’t claim insight because she’s lived parenthood, but because she’s lived in the world. “Although I do not have a family” acknowledges the cultural tripwire first, anticipating the reflex that only parents are allowed to speak seriously about children. Then she disarms it with “I have eyes, ears and imagination” - a musician’s toolkit repurposed as moral equipment. Observation, listening, and the capacity to picture lives beyond your own become a rebuttal to the gatekeeping that often surrounds discussions of kids, schooling, safety, and public spending.

The line “as most people know” is doing sly work. It’s a nod to consensus - kids matter - but also a subtle critique of how that consensus gets weaponized: invoked in speeches and budgets, then ignored in policy and practice. By calling the importance of children “paramount,” she’s borrowing a word from governance and constitutional language, not sentimentality. It suggests priority, not affection: children should sit at the top of our decision-making hierarchy, even for people who don’t have them.

Underneath, you can hear the familiar pressure on women in public life: the suspicion that a childless woman is missing a crucial organ of empathy. St. John’s counter-claim is crisp: empathy isn’t a biological credential; it’s an imaginative discipline. For an artist, that lands as both self-defense and a broader cultural demand - stop treating care as private property, start treating it as a shared civic obligation.