Parenting & Family Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis turns what’s usually treated as a sacred confession into a blunt cost-benefit statement: parenthood as schedule conflict, not destiny. The line works because it refuses the culturally approved language of regret. “To some degree” is the tell - a small, almost clinical admission of desire that’s immediately contained, as if he’s watching his own sentiment arise and then correcting for it. That’s classic Ellis: the therapeutic voice that distrusts grand narratives, especially the ones that smuggle “should” into private life.

The profanity (“goddamn”) isn’t just color; it’s a pressure release valve. It punctures the Hallmark version of fatherhood (“take the kids to the ballgame”) by treating it as an obligation with logistics, traffic, time, boredom. The ballgame stands in for the endless, repetitive labor of being present. He picks the most normcore American image of bonding and makes it sound like an errand. Subtext: love isn’t the issue; bandwidth is. And maybe, more pointedly, he’s refusing the moral economy where not having children requires a tragic backstory.

Context matters: Ellis built a career arguing that people torture themselves with irrational demands - that life must be fair, that one must be approved of, that one must fulfill a script. This quote reads like a lived demonstration of that philosophy. He grants himself preference without turning it into a verdict. He wanted something, but he didn’t build his identity around the wanting. That’s not coldness; it’s a deliberate demystification of adulthood’s most mythologized choice.