Parenting & Family Quote by John Updike

Updike’s line cuts with the kind of domesticated brutality he specialized in: the quiet horror of ordinary adulthood. “Speaking terms” is the tell. It’s not “loving” children or “providing” for them; it’s the basic civility of conversation, the willingness to be corrected by a smaller mind that asks blunt questions and won’t flatter your self-importance. Updike frames the adult’s drift away from children not as a scheduling problem but as a moral demotion. Lose that dialogue and you “cease to be men” - not in a chest-thumping, masculine way, but in the humanist sense of forfeiting what makes a person more than appetite and payroll.

The jab at “machines for eating and for earning money” is classic Updikean discomfort with middle-class automation: life reduced to consumption and productivity, with the self shrinking into routine. Children, in this view, are less a sentimental symbol than a disruptive technology. They force language back into the body. They make you narrate your day, explain your choices, improvise answers to “why,” and confront the parts of yourself that aren’t optimized for efficiency.

Contextually, it lands in postwar American prosperity, when the family is idealized but adulthood is increasingly mechanized by corporate work and suburban rhythms. Updike isn’t praising innocence; he’s warning that grown-ups who treat kids as background noise end up living like appliances - functional, fed, and spiritually mute.