Parenting & Family Quote by Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson’s line lands like a rimshot: everyone talks about embracing change, but most of us only tolerate it when it’s literally inevitable and someone else cleans up the mess. The joke is crude on purpose. “Babies in diapers” yanks the lofty rhetoric of transformation down into the nursery, where change is constant, uncomfortable, and rarely dignified. That bathos is the point: it punctures the self-flattering myth that adults are naturally adaptable creatures.

The intent is less to scold than to expose a hypocrisy. We praise disruption as long as it arrives as a TED Talk slogan or a rebrand; we hate it when it shows up as instability, loss of control, or unfamiliar rules. The diaper image smuggles in a sharper subtext: change is not just “newness,” it’s dependency. A baby benefits from change because change is done to them, for them, by someone with power. Adults resist because change often makes us the baby again - confused, exposed, waiting for relief, resentful of the vulnerability.

As a critic, Johnson is also winking at her own trade. Criticism is change’s handmaiden: it names what’s shifting, why it matters, and who gets hurt in the process. The line suggests why criticism so often irritates audiences and institutions. Nobody likes being told the old story is over, especially when they’re still comfortable inside it. The comedy makes that medicine go down, but it doesn’t soften the diagnosis.