Nature & Animals Quote by Arnold H. Glasow

There’s a sly cruelty in Glasow’s comparison: the teenager isn’t ignorant, just uncooperative, already equipped with everything they need and deeply uninterested in your helpful little seminar. “Giving a fish a bath” nails the adult impulse to stage-manage adolescence as if information were the missing ingredient. The joke is that the “facts of life” aren’t scarce; they’re ambient. Teenagers are marinating in peers, hormones, internet lore, and cultural scripts long before a parent or teacher gathers the courage to pronounce “sex” at the kitchen table.

The metaphor also exposes a kind of adult vanity. Bathing a fish isn’t merely unnecessary, it’s absurdly performative - a ritual for the bather, not the bathed. That’s the subtext: the talk is often less about educating teens than soothing adult anxiety, checking a responsibility box, proving you tried. It’s an ethics-of-parenting moment disguised as a biology lesson.

Glasow’s background as a businessman matters, too. This is managerial humor: the belief that problems yield to direct instruction, followed by the punchline that human behavior doesn’t run on memos. Teen sexuality and identity aren’t a product briefing; they’re messy, status-driven, emotional, and often resistant to authority. The line works because it cuts at the core mismatch between how adults want adolescence to function (rational, orderly, coachable) and how it actually does (already in motion, allergic to condescension). It’s funny because it’s true - and a little bleak because it suggests the “talk” is often too late, and sometimes beside the point.