Parenting & Family Quote by Charles de Lint

A clean little inversion does most of the work here: the “problem with children” isn’t children at all, but the adults attached to them like legal paperwork. Charles de Lint aims the punchline upward, at the gatekeepers who hover around childhood and quietly decide what kind of world a kid is allowed to have. It’s a line that flatters children by treating them as basically workable humans, while reserving its irritation for the grown-up ecosystem of anxieties, rules, projections, and performative competence.

The intent isn’t child-free sneering; it’s social critique in a comedian’s coat. De Lint, a writer steeped in contemporary fantasy and urban myth, often treats wonder as something fragile that survives in spite of adult institutions. Read in that light, “parents” becomes shorthand for the whole apparatus that colonizes kids: the overprotective micromanaging, the status competition disguised as “what’s best,” the way adult fear gets laundered into policy and etiquette. The line is funny because it’s recognizably true in everyday scenes - school meetings, playground negotiations, the implicit class and cultural policing that comes with who gets to be “a good parent.”

Subtext: children can be direct, imaginative, porous to experience; parents are where defensiveness and control enter the room. It also carries a sly warning to the listener: if you find kids difficult, check whether you’re really reacting to the adult expectations around them - including your own. The joke lands because it names an unspoken reality: childhood isn’t just a relationship with a child; it’s a relationship with other adults’ unprocessed lives.