Parenting & Family Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash turns the sacred glow of parenthood into a comic prop, and the joke lands because it’s built on a truth parents and children both recognize but rarely admit out loud: family intimacy is often structured around minor defiance. “Invented” is the first sly twist. Parents aren’t just people; they’re a social technology, a role engineered to absorb the impact of childhood ego. That word drags the whole institution of parenting out of nature and into design, as if moms and dads were patented to solve a problem: what to do with kids who need love and limits but can’t stand being managed.

The punchline hinges on a delicious reversal of purpose. We’re trained to think parents exist to teach, protect, and shape. Nash says their real utility is to be ignored. It’s not cruelty; it’s developmental comedy. Ignoring a parent is a child’s first cheap thrill of independence, a low-stakes way to declare “I’m me” without actually surviving on one’s own. Parents, in turn, become a kind of emotional furniture: always present, frequently unappreciated, essential precisely because they can be taken for granted.

The subtext is affectionate cynicism. Nash isn’t attacking parents so much as puncturing the sentimental script that parenting is constant gratitude and moral uplift. In the mid-century American domestic ideal - tidy homes, obedient kids, parental authority as civic virtue - this line works like a pin. It laughs at the performance while acknowledging the quiet bargain underneath: parents provide stability, children test it, and everyone calls it love.