Parenting & Family Quote by Robert MacNeil

MacNeil’s line reads like a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of treating parenting as logistics: schedules, screens, “quality time” measured in minutes. A journalist famous for making the world feel legible on nightly television, he’s arguing that the most powerful transmission in a home isn’t information but atmosphere. “Certain words” are almost beside the point; it’s the “thrilling quality of voice” and “uplift of the heart” that do the real work. The parent becomes a broadcaster, and the child is the receptive audience, learning not just language but how to feel about reality.

The intent is deceptively simple: elevate the mundane act of speaking to kids into an act of creation. “Plant” is an instructive verb. Magic isn’t delivered like a package; it’s seeded, slowly taking root in a mind that will later mistake it for its own imagination. That’s the subtext: children don’t remember lectures, they remember tone. A parent’s awe, courage, tenderness, even mischief can be smuggled into a child through cadence and conviction, long before the child has the critical tools to argue back.

The context matters because it comes from a public communicator, not a mystic. MacNeil spent a career watching how voice confers authority and meaning. Here he flips that insight inward: the first “news” a child receives is emotional. Before kids can parse facts, they absorb a worldview - whether life is frightening, promising, comic, sacred. The quote is less sentimental than strategic: if you want resilient, curious people, start by sounding like the world is worth listening to.