Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Foran

Foran leans into an uncomfortable truth adults prefer to sentimentalize away: childhood isn’t innocence so much as raw appetite. The line works because it refuses the “kids are pure” script and replaces it with something closer to lived experience - the magnetism of the forbidden. “Attraction to evil” isn’t a theological claim; it’s a psychological one. He’s naming the charge kids feel around anything that breaks the rules, scares the grown-ups, or hints at secret power.

The phrasing is doing quiet rhetorical work. “If we all remember” is a small trapdoor under the reader’s moral high ground. It recruits adult nostalgia as evidence, suggesting that fascination with darkness isn’t an aberration but a common memory we’ve conveniently edited out. Then he piles on plain, punchy descriptors - “exciting,” “interesting” - words that belong to entertainment, not ethics. That’s the subtext: evil sells because it stimulates curiosity before it triggers conscience. For a kid still assembling a moral framework, “evil” is often experienced first as narrative: the villain, the dare, the scary story, the taboo word. The thrill precedes the judgment.

Contextually, this reads like a corrective to moral panic. Adults often treat children’s interest in violent games, horror, or transgressive humor as contamination. Foran suggests it’s development: testing boundaries, rehearsing fear, exploring agency. The warning is implicit, too. If evil is exciting, then the adult task isn’t denial - it’s guidance, giving kids safer scripts for that curiosity before someone else supplies the real thing.