"It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself"
About this Quote
Parenthood gets sold as a one-way transfer of wisdom: the grown-ups instruct, the kids absorb, the end. Joyce Maynard flips that script with a line that’s both tender and unsparing. The first move is a quiet demotion of parental authority. “It’s not only children who grow” implies that the adult self isn’t finished, and that pretending otherwise is a kind of fraud. Growth becomes reciprocal, not hierarchical.
The subtext sharpens in the next sentence: children aren’t just being watched; they’re watching. Maynard isn’t talking about surveillance so much as moral inference. Kids learn who you are less from what you preach than from what you normalize: how you handle disappointment, ambition, tenderness, boredom, compromise. The phrase “what we do with ours” shifts the parenting conversation away from managing a child’s trajectory and toward the scarier question of whether you’re living a life you’d want them to copy.
The closing lines land because they reject the cheap comfort of advice. “I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun” reads like a rebuke to inspirational parenting as performance. The only credible pedagogy is embodiment. If you want to raise someone brave, you have to let them see you risk embarrassment. If you want them to believe reinvention is possible, you have to attempt it yourself.
Context matters: Maynard’s work often circles identity, family, and the cost of self-mythologizing. Here, she’s staging a corrective to the parental fantasy of control: your life isn’t just your own story anymore; it’s their blueprint.
The subtext sharpens in the next sentence: children aren’t just being watched; they’re watching. Maynard isn’t talking about surveillance so much as moral inference. Kids learn who you are less from what you preach than from what you normalize: how you handle disappointment, ambition, tenderness, boredom, compromise. The phrase “what we do with ours” shifts the parenting conversation away from managing a child’s trajectory and toward the scarier question of whether you’re living a life you’d want them to copy.
The closing lines land because they reject the cheap comfort of advice. “I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun” reads like a rebuke to inspirational parenting as performance. The only credible pedagogy is embodiment. If you want to raise someone brave, you have to let them see you risk embarrassment. If you want them to believe reinvention is possible, you have to attempt it yourself.
Context matters: Maynard’s work often circles identity, family, and the cost of self-mythologizing. Here, she’s staging a corrective to the parental fantasy of control: your life isn’t just your own story anymore; it’s their blueprint.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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