Parenting & Family Quote by Mary Calderone

Calderone’s line politely detonates the fantasy that parenting is a private hobby. By putting scare quotes around "our children", she punctures possessiveness: kids are not extensions of adult identity or family reputation, not trophies to be managed behind closed doors. They’re future participants in other people’s lives, and that shift in vantage point is the quote’s engine. It forces parents to imagine the downstream consequences of what they teach, tolerate, and refuse to name.

The phrasing is deliberately social: husbands and wives, parents of grandchildren. She’s not romanticizing the nuclear family so much as exploiting its emotional leverage. Even readers uninterested in abstract civic duty tend to care about who their child might marry, how they might treat a partner, what kind of household they’ll build. Calderone uses that intimate anxiety to smuggle in a broader argument: raising children is also preparing citizens for consent, responsibility, and mutual care.

Context sharpens the intent. Calderone was a physician and a foundational figure in modern sex education, often confronting cultural denial around sexuality, reproduction, and family life. Read there, the quote doubles as a rebuke to moral panic. If children will become spouses and parents, then silence about bodies, boundaries, contraception, and communication isn’t “innocence”; it’s negligence that someone else will pay for later.

The subtext is accountability across generations: your parenting doesn’t end at your doorstep. It shows up in someone else’s marriage, someone else’s safety, and eventually in the lives of the grandchildren you claim to treasure.