Parenting & Family Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis lands the joke with a surgeon's calm: the people most invested in shaping a child are often the least effective at it. The line is built on a sly reversal of authority. Parents and grandparents are supposed to be the primary influencers; Marquis suggests their very role cancels their persuasive power. It's not just that kids resist rules. It's that familial love comes bundled with surveillance, history, and stakes. Advice from a parent never arrives as pure information; it arrives with a ledger of past misbehavior, a threat of consequence, and a whiff of "because I said so". Children, exquisitely sensitive to status, hear control where adults hear care.

The subtext is less anti-parent than anti-moralizing. Marquis implies that influence is an art of distance. The most potent shapers of a child's behavior are often adjacent figures: teachers, coaches, older siblings, friend's parents, the glamorous stranger who embodies a future self. Their power comes from not needing anything. They can praise without bargaining, correct without humiliation, model without enforcing. A parent can't compete with that neutrality.

Context matters: Marquis wrote in an early 20th-century America where "proper upbringing" was practically a civic religion, and advice literature thrived on the fantasy that character could be engineered at home. His quip punctures that confidence. It's a newsroom aphorism, skeptical of official roles and flattering to informal influence. The cynicism isn't nihilistic; it's diagnostic. If you want to reach a child, Marquis hints, stop trying to win as a parent and start listening like a person.