Parenting & Family Quote by Connie Chung

Domestic logistics rarely get framed as a professional manifesto, but Connie Chung turns the school run into a small thesis about women’s work in public life. The matter-of-fact cadence matters: “six-and-a-half,” “big chunk,” “hoping,” “maybe.” She’s not delivering a rallying cry; she’s narrating a schedule. That understatement is the point. It reveals how thoroughly parenting gets treated as the default job that must be “managed” around the real one, even when the speaker is a famously high-powered journalist.

The quote’s intent is pragmatic - she’s mapping time - but the subtext is negotiation. Chung is describing the daily bargaining women in demanding careers are expected to perform: proving they can be fully committed to work while also being visibly present at home. “Certainly take him” signals a non-negotiable maternal responsibility; “come back to work” reads like the required reassurance to employers, audiences, and perhaps herself that ambition remains intact. The verbs do cultural work: caregiving is rendered as transport (“take,” “pick him up”), a way to compress intimacy into tasks that can fit between meetings.

Contextually, Chung’s generation fought to be taken seriously in newsrooms built around masculine assumptions: long, unpredictable hours; an unencumbered worker; a spouse handling the rest. Her sentence captures the quiet absurdity of that model without naming it. It’s not a complaint. It’s a portrait of the double bind, delivered in the language women learn to use when the stakes are credibility and the price of candor can be career-limiting.