Parenting & Family Quote by Sydney J. Harris

Harris takes a domestic practice that’s usually sold as “planning” and flips it into a joke about human stubbornness. The line lands because it sounds, at first blush, like the calm voice of experience: give parents time, and they’ll improve. Then he yanks the rug. Time doesn’t refine us into wiser, gentler caretakers; it just arms us with a new, equally confident set of errors. The punchline is the deadpan word “permits,” as if parenting were a laboratory with controlled variables rather than a messy, emotionally loaded relationship where guilt and pride do most of the steering.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of the self-help faith that life naturally produces progress. Harris implies that “learning” in families is rarely clean or cumulative; it’s reactive. Parents don’t correct course so much as overcorrect. The older child gets the strict rules, the anxious hovering, the insistence on achievement. Years later, chastened by fallout and regret, the younger child gets the opposite: loosened standards, a lighter touch, maybe a little neglect disguised as trust. Both approaches can injure; both can be justified as love.

As a mid-century journalist, Harris is writing from inside an American culture newly obsessed with psychological expertise and the promise of the well-adjusted household. His wit punctures that optimism without turning cruel: the humor isn’t aimed at children, but at the adult fantasy that control plus hindsight equals competence. The line’s bite is its realism: parenting changes, not because parents become enlightened, but because they become haunted.