Parenting & Family Quote by Judith Viorst

Viorst nails a peculiarly modern vanity: parenting as a progress narrative. The line is built like a tidy syllogism, but it’s really an indictment of how easily self-congratulation disguises itself as “high standards.” “Because we believe” doesn’t just describe confidence; it signals a collective faith, a story we tell ourselves to justify the exhausting project of optimization. Parenting becomes less about raising a child than proving we’ve transcended whatever damage or neglect we’ve cataloged in our own upbringing.

The subtext is sharper: this expectation isn’t love, it’s a wager. If I’m “better” than my parents, then my kid should be “better” than I was. That logic turns childhood into a scoreboard, where every tantrum threatens the parent’s self-image. Viorst implies the quiet cruelty hiding inside good intentions: the child becomes evidence for the parent’s moral and psychological advancement. It’s the kind of pressure that doesn’t announce itself as pressure because it arrives disguised as enrichment, mindfulness, the right schools, the right screen limits, the right kind of emotional literacy.

Context matters here. Viorst’s work often punctures middle-class therapeutic culture with a dry, unsentimental eye. Coming of age alongside postwar shifts in psychology and self-help, she’s watching generations use insight as inheritance: we diagnosed our parents’ mistakes, so surely we can engineer different outcomes. Her sentence exposes the trap: progress is not genetic, wisdom isn’t transferable by sheer will, and children aren’t a “fixed” version of us.