"Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching"
About this Quote
Lebowitz turns a familiar parenting scene into a neat little indictment of modern, child-centered domestic life. The joke isn’t just that kids have terrible taste; it’s that the adult has abdicated authority so completely that she’s now soliciting creative direction from the least qualified person in the house. The rainy day is doing important work here: it’s the classic trapdoor of family boredom, the moment when the cultural marketplace (screens, noise, low-stakes chaos) rushes in to fill the gap left by structure. Asking the child “what he feels like doing” sounds enlightened, empathetic, even progressive. Lebowitz treats it as a category error.
The subtext is a critique of feelings as policy. “Feels like” is the giveaway phrase: it elevates impulse to the level of plan, and it flatters the child with the illusion of sovereignty. Lebowitz’s punchline restores the adult’s suppressed truth: parenting isn’t a focus group. It’s governance. The parent may want harmony, but what arrives is performance art featuring cushions, sugar, and the physical limits of your living room.
Culturally, this lands as a late-20th-century hangover from therapeutic language seeping into everyday life. Lebowitz, always allergic to earnestness, uses a single sentence to mock the way adults outsource judgment while still expecting an aesthetically tolerable outcome. It’s also quietly self-serving in the best comic way: she’s not arguing for rigid discipline so much as a parent’s right to curate their own misery. If you’re going to be trapped inside, at least don’t pretend you’re running a democracy.
The subtext is a critique of feelings as policy. “Feels like” is the giveaway phrase: it elevates impulse to the level of plan, and it flatters the child with the illusion of sovereignty. Lebowitz’s punchline restores the adult’s suppressed truth: parenting isn’t a focus group. It’s governance. The parent may want harmony, but what arrives is performance art featuring cushions, sugar, and the physical limits of your living room.
Culturally, this lands as a late-20th-century hangover from therapeutic language seeping into everyday life. Lebowitz, always allergic to earnestness, uses a single sentence to mock the way adults outsource judgment while still expecting an aesthetically tolerable outcome. It’s also quietly self-serving in the best comic way: she’s not arguing for rigid discipline so much as a parent’s right to curate their own misery. If you’re going to be trapped inside, at least don’t pretend you’re running a democracy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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