Parenting Quote by Laurel Lee

The line borrows its power from a strange, telling mash-up: parental tenderness spoken in the vocabulary of weapons and social ascent. “Privilege” frames child-rearing not as an obligation but as a status claim, a right the speaker worries could be denied. That’s a modern pressure point - the sense that institutions (schools, courts, culture) are competing authors of a child’s values, leaving parents to argue for control in the language of liberty and entitlement.

The metaphor does heavy lifting. Children become “arrows,” implying direction, force, and purpose rather than autonomy. The parent is the archer, the one who aims, selects the target, and provides the “exhortations” - not dialogue, not listening, but motivating commands. It’s a flattering vision of guidance: loving, intentional, almost heroic. It’s also quietly anxious. Arrows can misfire; they can be bent; they can be stolen from the quiver. The need to claim the “privilege” hints at cultural panic that someone else is shaping the trajectory.

Then there’s “the high place,” an old biblical-sounding phrase that doubles as aspirational branding. It suggests spiritual elevation and worldly success at once, a peak that feels ordained rather than merely competitive. That ambiguity is the point: it allows the speaker to sell a moral project as upward mobility, and to sell upward mobility as righteousness.

In context, this kind of rhetoric often shows up in speeches around education, parenting rights, or faith-based civic identity. It works because it turns policy disputes into a parental epic: who gets to aim the future, and what counts as the target.