Parenting & Family Quote by Clayton Christensen

There is a quiet provocation in Christensen admitting, almost heretically in a culture obsessed with “intentional parenting,” that he and his wife “haven’t raised” their children. The line is less abdication than insurgency: a deliberate downgrade of the heroic parent narrative in favor of something older and sturdier, the village model. Coming from a celebrated business thinker, it also reads like a corrective to the managerial fantasy that every meaningful outcome can be engineered at home through the right inputs, routines, and optimization.

The phrasing matters. “A whole community” doesn’t just mean neighbors who occasionally babysit; it implies an ecosystem of repeated, unglamorous acts - rides, meals, correction, example, patience - the social infrastructure that quietly forms a person. By calling them “selfless Christians,” Christensen locates the source of that infrastructure in shared moral obligation rather than mere convenience. It’s a values claim, not just a gratitude note: faith communities don’t only produce belief; they produce competence. “Faithful, competent adults” is a striking pairing, insisting that character and capability grow together when adults outside the nuclear family take responsibility.

The subtext is also a warning to ambitious professionals: the cost of building a life is often paid by others in your orbit, and the honest accounting requires naming them. In an era of parental burnout and individualized pressure, Christensen’s statement reframes child-rearing as collective work - and quietly asks whether we’ve dismantled the very communities that make “raising kids” possible.