Parenting & Family Quote by Steve Burns

What lands here is the tension between affection and unease: Burns insists on liking children while admitting he used to be afraid of them, and the repetition of "always, always" feels less like emphasis than self-reassurance. It reads like someone retroactively stitching confidence onto a past self that didn’t have it. The fear isn’t villainized, either; it’s treated as a normal byproduct of unfamiliarity. That’s disarming in a culture where adults are expected to either perform effortless kid-competence or keep their distance.

The subtext is biography-as-explanation without turning into confession. "I never really grew up... with a lot of little kids around" frames discomfort not as a personal flaw but as a missing context, a gap in social training. Then he pivots to "Even though I am from a kind of Italian family", lightly poking at the stereotype that big, child-filled households are automatic. That "kind of" matters: it softens the claim, signals ambivalence about the label, and keeps the moment conversational rather than declarative.

As an actor associated with children’s TV, the line also functions as an antidote to the eerie expectations we project onto adults who make work for kids. Burns doesn’t present himself as a natural-born children’s entertainer; he presents himself as someone who had to learn the language. That humility is the point: it reframes caring for kids as a skill you can acquire, not a magical personality trait you either have or don’t.