Parenting & Family Quote by Susannah McCorkle

McCorkle isn’t hand-wringing about “kids these days” so much as naming a particular kind of cultural chokehold: a soundscape engineered to keep vulnerability from ever getting airtime. Her language does the work of a musician, not a scold. “Bombarded” is physical. “Hard, commercial sounds” isn’t just about volume or genre; it’s about a marketplace aesthetic that rewards impact over intimacy, branding over nuance. The worry is less that young listeners will like the wrong music and more that they’ll learn the wrong emotional posture.

The sharpest move is how she frames softness as a developmental right, not a personality trait. “They don’t even have a chance” suggests this isn’t an individual failure of taste; it’s an environment designed to crowd out quieter feeling. “Without fear of being ridiculed” reveals the real antagonist: social policing. Loudness becomes a kind of armor, and the culture teaches kids that tenderness is a liability you’ll pay for publicly. That’s a brutal insight because it connects sound to status, and taste to survival.

Context matters here. McCorkle came up as a jazz singer devoted to tone, phrasing, and emotional shading - the kinds of subtleties that don’t translate into mass-market spectacle. In a late-20th-century media ecosystem increasingly driven by radio formatting, MTV-era image, and high-gloss pop aggression, her line reads like a defense of listening itself: not as consumption, but as a practice of becoming human in private.