Parenting & Family Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

Howe lands the punch with a neat little seesaw of pity: whichever side you’re on, you’re convinced the other has it easier. It’s a line built like a gossip column sentence but sharpened into social diagnosis. “Sorry for each other” sounds humane, even neighborly, yet it’s also a quiet indictment of how quickly empathy turns into self-justification. The joke isn’t that one group is wrong; it’s that both are certain they’re right.

The intent is editorial in the old-school sense: a compact observation about the moral weather of ordinary life. Babies are less a subject than a symbol of competing narratives. For parents, the childless look free, rested, unburdened by diapers and the endless vigilance that turns time into a scarce resource. For the childless, parents look trapped: financially squeezed, socially sidelined, their identities reorganized around someone else’s needs. Each side frames its own condition as a kind of sacrifice and treats the other’s as either enviable privilege or avoidable mistake.

That symmetry is the subtext’s sting. Howe exposes how modern status works: we measure our lives by what they cost us, then demand recognition for the bill. Coming from a newspaper editor in late-19th/early-20th-century America, the line also sits in an era when “family” was both civic ideal and private strain. Howe doesn’t romanticize babies or dismiss them; he points at the transactional pity people use to keep their choices feeling inevitable.