"Children need continuity as they grow and learn"
About this Quote
“Children need continuity as they grow and learn” sounds like the kind of sentence a city hall lifer would deploy the way a good mayor deploys streetlights: not to dazzle, but to make the daily world navigable. Thomas Menino, Boston’s long-serving, blunt-edged political operator, isn’t reaching for poetry here. He’s staking out a governing philosophy in one calm, unarguable line.
The word “continuity” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a policy term dressed up as a moral one, a bridge between what voters feel (kids deserve stability) and what budgets fund (steady schools, predictable services, sustained programs). Menino’s intent is persuasion through plainness: make an argument so basic it becomes difficult to oppose without sounding reckless. In the civic imagination, “continuity” implies safe routines, familiar adults, and institutions that don’t yank the ladder up mid-climb. It also quietly rebukes political churn: flashy reforms, revolving-door leadership, constant restructuring that treats children like variables in an experiment.
The subtext is that instability is not abstract. It’s a bus route that changes, a school that closes, a neighborhood priced out, a teacher laid off, a family moved by housing pressure. Menino governed during decades when urban America was wrestling with deindustrialization’s aftershocks and gentrification’s accelerants. In that context, “continuity” reads as both compassionate and tactical: it elevates the child as the public’s most defensible stakeholder, while legitimizing incrementalism as the ethical choice. The line works because it sounds like common sense, but it’s also an argument about power: who gets steadiness, and who is forced to adapt.
The word “continuity” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a policy term dressed up as a moral one, a bridge between what voters feel (kids deserve stability) and what budgets fund (steady schools, predictable services, sustained programs). Menino’s intent is persuasion through plainness: make an argument so basic it becomes difficult to oppose without sounding reckless. In the civic imagination, “continuity” implies safe routines, familiar adults, and institutions that don’t yank the ladder up mid-climb. It also quietly rebukes political churn: flashy reforms, revolving-door leadership, constant restructuring that treats children like variables in an experiment.
The subtext is that instability is not abstract. It’s a bus route that changes, a school that closes, a neighborhood priced out, a teacher laid off, a family moved by housing pressure. Menino governed during decades when urban America was wrestling with deindustrialization’s aftershocks and gentrification’s accelerants. In that context, “continuity” reads as both compassionate and tactical: it elevates the child as the public’s most defensible stakeholder, while legitimizing incrementalism as the ethical choice. The line works because it sounds like common sense, but it’s also an argument about power: who gets steadiness, and who is forced to adapt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|
More Quotes by Thomas
Add to List
