Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Average, Aldrich suggests, is the rarest adjective in the nursery. The joke lands because it exposes a quiet social pact: everyone knows the bell curve exists, yet parenthood turns statistics into an insult. By framing “average ability” as a mythical creature you “can’t find,” Aldrich uses mock-astonishment to puncture a very American kind of self-deception, the one that treats ordinary as a moral failure rather than a neutral fact.

The line works as a compact satire of status anxiety. “Admit” is doing heavy lifting; it implies that acknowledging mediocrity would be a confession, not an observation. Parenting becomes reputational management, where a child’s aptitude is less a lived reality than a public claim. Aldrich isn’t really interested in children’s capacities so much as adults’ need to curate them. The possessive “his child” sharpens the sting: the child is framed as an extension of the parent’s identity, meaning “average” threatens the parent’s self-image as much as the kid’s prospects.

Context matters. Aldrich is writing in a late-19th-century America increasingly obsessed with merit, schooling, and social sorting - an era when “ability” is starting to sound measurable and consequential, not just a quirk of temperament. His quip anticipates today’s participation-trophy discourse and gifted-kid inflation, where every child is “exceptional” and the word “normal” feels like sabotage. It’s not cynicism for its own sake; it’s a warning about the emotional economy of ambition, and how easily love gets tangled up with bragging rights.