Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Orben

“Never raise your hand to your children - it leaves your midsection unprotected” lands like a rimshot, but the joke is doing more than scoring an easy laugh. Orben, a career gag writer and entertainer, smuggles a moral into a one-liner by pretending the moral isn’t the point. The surface meaning is pure slapstick logic: if you lift your arm to strike, you expose your stomach and invite retaliation. That absurd tactical framing is the trick. It sidesteps sermonizing about parenting and instead makes violence look not just wrong but faintly ridiculous - a decision so poorly reasoned it fails even on its own brutish terms.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of adult authority. Corporal punishment depends on a fantasy of one-way power: parent as unchallengeable force, child as helpless target. Orben punctures that fantasy by imagining the child as an agent who can hit back, physically or metaphorically. “Midsection unprotected” isn’t only about a punch; it’s about vulnerability. The parent who resorts to force reveals insecurity, loss of control, and a relationship reduced to dominance and counterattack.

Context matters: Orben’s comedy comes out of mid-century American club-and-TV humor, where domestic life was a prime setup and cultural norms still treated spanking as ordinary discipline. By couching a critique inside a quip, he makes it socially portable - something you can repeat at a dinner party without picking a fight. The laugh is the delivery system; the intent is to make you feel, for a second, how small and precarious “raising your hand” really is.