Parenting & Family Quote by Abigail Van Buren

The line lands because it flips a tired parenting cliche into a practical, slightly tart prescription. “Keep their feet on the ground” usually means humility, realism, not getting swept away by ego or entitlement. Van Buren’s move is to argue that humility isn’t taught by lectures or scolding; it’s engineered through obligation. The image does the work: feet on the ground, shoulders bearing weight. Responsibility becomes ballast.

As a journalist and advice columnist, Van Buren was writing from inside America’s postwar family anxiety machine, where “raising good kids” doubled as a referendum on national character. Her advice is a rebuke to two temptations: indulgence (kids as fragile projects to be protected from discomfort) and performative discipline (rules imposed for the parent’s authority rather than the child’s competence). The subtext is quietly democratic: give children real stakes, and they learn they’re not the center of the universe because the universe is depending on them in small, concrete ways.

There’s also an implicit warning about the cultural cost of weightlessness. A child who never carries anything becomes an adult who expects the world to carry them. Van Buren isn’t romanticizing hardship; she’s selling dignity. The “responsibility” she implies is not punishment but participation: chores, commitments, taking care of others. It’s a strategy for producing groundedness as a habit, not a personality trait, and it works because it treats kids as capable before they feel capable.