Parenting & Family Quote by Jane Howard

Jane Howard slips a hard truth into a sentence that sounds almost tender: parents aren’t just caregivers, they’re psychological insulation. The line works because it refuses the Hallmark version of family and goes straight for the strange bargain adulthood offers us: we can pay taxes, raise kids, accumulate grief, and still outsource the most terrifying thought to someone else’s continued heartbeat. As long as a parent is alive, death feels like an event that happens “up the line,” part of an older generation’s contract with time. Their presence lets us pretend the ledger isn’t inching toward our own name.

The subtext is quietly unsentimental. Howard doesn’t romanticize parents as moral guides or best friends; she casts them as a structural support beam in the architecture of the self. “Shield” is the key verb: not “comfort” or “teach,” but protect, like body armor. That protection is also a kind of delay tactic, and she admits it with disarming clarity. Innocence here isn’t virtue; it’s a loophole. To be an “innocent child” is to occupy a temporary legal fiction where mortality is someone else’s problem.

Contextually, this feels like late-20th-century personal journalism at its sharpest: intimate without being confessional, observant about how ordinary family roles carry existential weight. Howard captures the specific ache of the first real adult threshold: not when you move out, or marry, or become a parent, but when the last person who made you a child is no longer there to do it.