Parenting & Family Quote by Dean Inge

A hundred years before birth is a deliberately impossible deadline, and that impossibility is the point. Inge’s line weaponizes exaggeration to mock the comforting fantasy that “good parenting” begins when the baby arrives, or even when the toddler starts misbehaving. If character is the target, he implies, the real machinery sits upstream: inherited dispositions, family habits, economic stability, neighborhood norms, schooling, religion, and the slow sediment of culture. By the time a child is in your arms, most of the forces that will shape him have already been bargaining over his future for generations.

The bite is that Inge isn’t really talking about children; he’s talking about adults and the stories they tell themselves. It’s a jab at moral panic and quick-fix reform - the Victorian and early 20th-century faith that a stern lecture, a better curriculum, or a cleaner entertainment culture can manufacture virtue on schedule. His “proper time” line turns childrearing into a long-game civic project, not a private performance. Want better citizens? Then look at how citizens live: housing, work, health, and the models of adulthood that children absorb before they can even name them.

Context matters: Inge, an English cleric-philosopher writing amid rapid modernization, saw tradition fraying and institutions struggling to keep pace. The quip carries a conservative warning (don’t expect miracles from late intervention) but also a progressive sting: if character is socially produced, society is morally on the hook. The joke lands because it refuses the easy alibi of timing and forces accountability onto the deep past.