Parenting & Family Quote by Luther Burbank

Burbank lands the punch with a gardener's cruelty: he pretends to praise our devotion to children by measuring it against something humbler and, in his world, more competently managed. The joke is barbed because it flips the expected hierarchy. Plants, which we like to imagine as passive background, get the careful attention, pruning, and long-term planning that parenting supposedly deserves. Children, by contrast, are treated as if they will simply "grow right" on their own. The line works because it converts neglect into a visible landscape: not a messy household, not a troubled adolescence, but a jungle of weed. You can see it, smell it, lose your footing in it.

The specific intent is reformist, but the method is insinuation. Burbank isn't just scolding parents; he's indicting a culture that romanticizes childhood while underfunding the slow, unglamorous labor that helps children thrive: education, health, stable housing, time, patience. "Paid attention" is doing a lot of work here. In horticulture it means deliberate intervention - thinning, staking, crossbreeding, choosing what survives. Applied to children, it becomes a provocation about what kind of society we are cultivating, and what we are letting run wild.

Context matters: Burbank's era was obsessed with improvement - scientific agriculture, eugenic fantasies, Progressive reform. A plant-breeder's worldview can easily slide from nurture into control. That tension hums under the wit: care is necessary, but so is humility about what, and who, we have the right to "prune."