"It's just hard not to listen to TV: it's spent so much more time raising us than parents have"
About this Quote
Groening lands the joke with a sting: TV is framed as the more reliable adult in the room, not because it deserves the job, but because it showed up. The line works by taking a private discomfort many people feel about screens and turning it into a blunt family-history fact. “Hard not to listen” isn’t praise; it’s an admission of conditioned attention. If a voice has been narrating your childhood for thousands of hours, it starts to feel like authority, even when it’s selling you cereal.
The subtext is less “parents are bad” than “modern parenting got outsourced.” Groening’s real target is the infrastructure that made that outsourcing normal: long work hours, fragmented households, and a culture that treats the television as both babysitter and background noise. By phrasing it as “raising,” he borrows the language of intimacy and responsibility, then slaps it onto a mass-produced medium whose incentives are ratings and ads. That mismatch is the critique.
Context matters: Groening is the Simpsons-era cartoonist who turned American domestic life into a sitcom laboratory. His work thrives on the idea that institutions meant to guide kids - school, church, politics, the family itself - are half-functional at best, while the media machine hums flawlessly. The line is funny because it’s exaggerated; it’s unsettling because it’s barely exaggerated. In a media-saturated upbringing, “TV” isn’t just entertainment. It’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had, and it taught you how to be a consumer before it taught you how to be a person.
The subtext is less “parents are bad” than “modern parenting got outsourced.” Groening’s real target is the infrastructure that made that outsourcing normal: long work hours, fragmented households, and a culture that treats the television as both babysitter and background noise. By phrasing it as “raising,” he borrows the language of intimacy and responsibility, then slaps it onto a mass-produced medium whose incentives are ratings and ads. That mismatch is the critique.
Context matters: Groening is the Simpsons-era cartoonist who turned American domestic life into a sitcom laboratory. His work thrives on the idea that institutions meant to guide kids - school, church, politics, the family itself - are half-functional at best, while the media machine hums flawlessly. The line is funny because it’s exaggerated; it’s unsettling because it’s barely exaggerated. In a media-saturated upbringing, “TV” isn’t just entertainment. It’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had, and it taught you how to be a consumer before it taught you how to be a person.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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