Parenting & Family Quote by David Duchovny

Duchovny frames adulthood as a two-faced deal: control masked as care, and jealousy disguised as nostalgia. The first hand is about ownership, a blunt verb that punctures the sentimentality adults wrap around parenting and authority. It’s not just that grown-ups “guide” children; they claim jurisdiction over them, narrating kids’ lives as if they’re extensions of adult plans, anxieties, and unfinished business. The line catches a cultural reflex: we moralize supervision while quietly enjoying the power it grants.

The second hand flips the mood from dominance to envy, and that pivot is the quote’s engine. Adults police children precisely because children represent what adults have forfeited: permission to be impulsive, to be absorbed, to change their minds without writing a manifesto about it. “We’d like to be kids our whole lives” isn’t a Hallmark yearning; it’s a confession that modern adulthood often feels like a job you can’t clock out of. Kids “get to do what they do” suggests a kind of social amnesty: their mistakes are tolerated, their weirdness interpreted as growth, not failure.

“Instincts” is doing a lot of work here. Duchovny isn’t romanticizing childhood innocence so much as pointing to a life less mediated by performance and self-surveillance. Coming from an actor, the subtext sharpens: adults are trained to manage impressions; kids haven’t learned the script yet. The tension, then, isn’t only generational. It’s about who gets to be unedited.