Parenting & Family Quote by Perry Como

Late-life regret hits hardest when it’s mundane. Perry Como’s line isn’t about scandal, addiction, or artistic compromise; it’s about hours. For a man whose brand was ease - the cardiganed calm of mid-century television - the confession lands with a quiet sting: the smoothness audiences heard came at the cost of time his children didn’t get.

Como’s profession makes the statement sharper. Show business doesn’t just take you away; it disguises the taking. Touring schedules, studio sessions, network demands, the unspoken rule that you stay “available” - it all gets framed as providing for the family, even as it reduces the family to something you support from a distance. The subtext is a kind of moral accounting: money and success don’t buy back presence. He’s not asking for forgiveness so much as issuing a warning that arrives too late to help him.

There’s also a generational undertone. Como came up in an era when fatherhood often meant steadiness, not intimacy, and when celebrity was newly industrialized: a machine that could turn a working-class barber into a household name and still make him feel absent at home. The sentence is plain, almost unsentimental, which is why it works. No poetic flourishes, no self-mythologizing. Just the bleakest truth about ambition: the life you build can crowd out the people you built it for.