Fatherhood Quote by William Shakespeare

The line lands like a quiet family argument overheard from the next room: everyone wants love to arrive on their own terms. Shakespeare sketches a two-way disappointment. Children want fathers to see with their eyes - to validate desire, immediacy, the felt truth of youth. Fathers want children to see with their judgment - to borrow experience, caution, the slow-earned instincts that come from consequence. Each demand is flattering to the demander (my perspective is the right one) and subtly coercive (love me by becoming me).

What makes it Shakespearean is the balance and the sting in the final clause: "and either may be wrong". He refuses the easy moral that elders are wise and youth is reckless, or that youth is pure and elders are tyrants. The subtext is epistemic: seeing and judging are different instruments, and both can malfunction. The child's "eyes" can mistake novelty for necessity; the father's "judgment" can harden into prejudice, confusing protection with control. Shakespeare puts the two verbs in tension to show how generational conflict is less about facts than about what counts as reality - sensation or interpretation.

In context, this fits Shakespeare's broader obsession with mistaken perception: characters misread lovers, enemies, even themselves, then build entire decisions on that misreading. The quote diagnoses the family as the first theater of that error. You don't just inherit a name; you inherit a way of seeing, and the fight is over who gets to write the script.