Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

Parenthood, in De Vries's hands, is stripped of its halo and reintroduced as a darkly comic labor arrangement: you bankroll your own adversary. The line works because it steals the moral prestige of caregiving and swaps in the logic of animal training and workplace exploitation. "Feeding the hand that bites you" flips the familiar proverb into a petty tragedy of dependence, where love isn't a radiant motive so much as an obligation with teeth marks.

De Vries, a novelist with a satirist's ear, aims his joke at the sentimental culture that treats parenting as pure fulfillment. The metaphor implies a child not as cherub but as creature: impulsive, entitled, intermittently feral. Yet the real target isn't the kid; it's the parent's expectation that nurture should be repaid with gratitude. The bite is the tantrum, the ingratitude, the adolescent contempt, the casual cruelty children deploy when they're safe enough to be awful. That safety is the point: the parent is the one person a child can attack without losing the relationship. The line's cynicism is also an indictment of unconditional love as a social script, a mandate to keep pouring resources into someone who may respond with rejection.

Context matters: mid-century American domestic ideology sold the family as stability and salvation. De Vries punctures that marketing with a single, barbed image. It's funny because it feels like a confession you're not supposed to make, and true because parenting often involves investing in a future person who, in the present, has no incentive to be nice about it.