"There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience"
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Broyard’s line is built like a tidy little seesaw: obedience on one end, “everything” on the other, and modern parenting wobbling in the middle. The joke lands because it’s not really about kids; it’s about adult wish-fulfillment disguised as enlightened child-rearing. Where an older model demanded compliance and little else, today’s model often demands a full portfolio: emotional intelligence, creativity, moral clarity, resilience, academic excellence, social fluency. The punchline is that the one thing we’ve supposedly stopped insisting on - obedience - sneaks back in through the side door as performance.
The subtext is a critique of aspiration culture. We tell ourselves we’ve traded authoritarianism for freedom, but we’ve merely upgraded the expectations. The child becomes a lifestyle project: proof of our values, our taste, our psychological sophistication. “Everything” is also a way of saying “our anxiety, scaled down and outsourced.” We want children to self-regulate, self-actualize, self-advocate, and somehow still align with our carefully curated ideals, without the messy honesty of calling it control.
As a critic, Broyard’s intent is diagnostic rather than nostalgic. He isn’t advocating a return to strict obedience; he’s puncturing the smugness of the present tense. The line works because it names a modern hypocrisy: we reject the old vocabulary of authority, yet we intensify the pressure by requiring children to internalize it. Obedience didn’t disappear; it got rebranded as “potential.”
The subtext is a critique of aspiration culture. We tell ourselves we’ve traded authoritarianism for freedom, but we’ve merely upgraded the expectations. The child becomes a lifestyle project: proof of our values, our taste, our psychological sophistication. “Everything” is also a way of saying “our anxiety, scaled down and outsourced.” We want children to self-regulate, self-actualize, self-advocate, and somehow still align with our carefully curated ideals, without the messy honesty of calling it control.
As a critic, Broyard’s intent is diagnostic rather than nostalgic. He isn’t advocating a return to strict obedience; he’s puncturing the smugness of the present tense. The line works because it names a modern hypocrisy: we reject the old vocabulary of authority, yet we intensify the pressure by requiring children to internalize it. Obedience didn’t disappear; it got rebranded as “potential.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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