Parenting & Family Quote by Morley Safer

Morley Safer’s line is a polite grenade: it flatters the sentimental ideal of “children” while exposing how quickly that ideal curdles into irritation when it meets a real, needy, loud, inconvenient person. The bite comes from the tiny pivot between “kids” as a concept and “their kids” as an obligation. “Kids” are clean marketing copy - the symbol of innocence, legacy, and social virtue. “Their kids” are homework battles, tantrums in public, a wrecked schedule, and the slow erosion of adult autonomy. Safer’s journalist’s instinct is to name the hypocrisy without sermonizing; he lets the syntax do the shaming.

The subtext is less anti-child than anti-performance. Modern parenthood often doubles as identity branding: the stroller as status object, the birthday party as content, the child as proof of having a “full” life. Safer punctures that by insisting on specificity. Loving the category is easy because it demands nothing. Loving the particular child requires patience, self-interrogation, and the willingness to lose.

Context matters: Safer spent decades watching public narratives and private behavior diverge - politicians, institutions, whole cultures selling a story they can’t live up to. Read that way, the quote isn’t only about parenting. It’s about any relationship where the idea is adored precisely because it stays abstract. The joke lands because it’s uncomfortably familiar: we praise family values, then resent the family when it behaves like family.