Parenting & Family Quote by Bo Bennett

Parenting gets pitched as a Hallmark montage; Bo Bennett reframes it as the most relentless customer-service job you never applied for. The joke lands because it steals the language of the workplace - "experience", "dealing with", "difficult people" - and drags it into the nursery, where the "client" can’t be reasoned with, can’t be fired, and absolutely will escalate. That corporate phrasing is the engine: it turns the sacred aura around childrearing into a blunt skills-training program, then lets the reader feel the guilty relief of admitting, yes, kids can be difficult.

The intent isn’t anti-child; it’s anti-sentimentality. Bennett, a businessman, speaks in the dialect of self-improvement and professional competence, so parenting becomes a practical credential. The subtext is a quiet critique of how adults often talk about emotional labor only when it can be monetized or translated into "leadership". Kids, in this framing, are the ultimate crash course in conflict resolution, patience, negotiation, and boundary-setting - except the boundaries move daily.

Context matters: in a culture that treats parenting as both an identity brand and a performance (especially online), the line punctures the fantasy. It validates the lived truth that love doesn’t erase friction; it just changes your tolerance for it. The wit comes from the provocation: your toughest interpersonal training won’t come from a management seminar. It will come from someone three feet tall who is crying because the banana broke.