Wealth & Money Quote by John Gardner

Parenting advice rarely sounds this unsentimental, which is exactly why Gardner's line lands. He frames financial education as exposure therapy: you do not teach money by lecturing about it, you teach it by letting a kid feel the sting of consequences while the stakes are still small and the safety net is real. The phrase "including stupid choices" is the tell. It's not a grudging aside; it's the thesis. Gardner understands that prudence isn't inherited through rules, it's acquired through a few low-grade failures that recalibrate desire, impatience, and self-image.

The subtext is a critique of control disguised as care. A parent who polices every purchase isn't preventing mistakes so much as outsourcing them to the future, where the mistakes get pricier and the guardrails vanish. "College" functions as cultural shorthand for the first unsupervised marketplace: easy credit, peer status games, sudden autonomy, and a heady sense that consequences are optional. Gardner isn't moralizing about youth; he's warning adults about delayed risk.

Context matters: writing in an era when college was increasingly seen as a launching pad into the middle class, Gardner punctures the fantasy that good intentions can substitute for practice. His novelist's instinct shows in the structure: a tight cause-and-effect sentence with a dark little punchline. It's less a maxim than a plot summary - suppress agency now, and the story will demand it later, on worse terms.