Parenting & Family Quote by Phyllis McGinley

McGinley treats praise like a physical object: something you can’t manufacture on command without it turning clammy in your hands. “Warming and desirable” admits the basic human appetite for approval, but the pivot comes fast: praise isn’t a mood, it’s a wage. Calling it “earned” drags complimenting out of the realm of polite etiquette and into the moral economy of deserts, where flattery becomes not just tacky but counterfeit.

The line works because it refuses the modern fantasy that affirmation is inherently virtuous. McGinley implies that indiscriminate praise doesn’t merely lose value; it corrupts the relationship between the praised and the praiser. If praise can be handed out like mints at a restaurant hostess stand, it stops being recognition and becomes management.

Then she lands the metaphor that makes the argument stick: “like a hug from a child.” A child’s hug is prized precisely because it’s uncoached. It can’t be negotiated, guilted, or bought without feeling grotesque. That comparison quietly indicts adult social life, where compliments are often transactional - networking, smoothing conflict, soft-selling a critique. McGinley is defending a kind of emotional truth-in-advertising: the best praise carries the risk of scarcity.

Context matters too. Writing from midcentury American literary culture - a world of manners, status, and tight social scripts - McGinley’s suspicion of easy praise reads as both aesthetic and ethical. She’s protecting the dignity of genuine admiration by making it harder to get.