Parenting & Family Quote by J.B. Priestley

Happiness, for Priestley, isn’t a private possession you hoard; it’s a relay. The line is built like a small domestic ritual: you hold up a fragment of your own past ("what once delighted you") and watch it light again in someone newer. That "added to your own" is the sneaky masterstroke. He’s not romanticizing children as symbols of innocence so much as describing a psychological multiplication effect: your pleasure returns, but with an extra charge because it has survived you, traveled across time, and still works.

Priestley came out of a Britain that had been aggressively disenchanted by industrial modernity and two world wars. A writer with a populist ear and a moral streak, he often argued that ordinary life - family, leisure, small joys - mattered against the machinery of status, money, and national crisis. Here, the context is almost a quiet rebuttal to the era’s big abstractions. After catastrophe, the most radical thing may be continuity.

The subtext is also about aging without surrender. Adult delight tends to calcify into nostalgia or irony; Priestley proposes a third option: return, but return as a gift. The child becomes a witness who certifies that your earlier wonder wasn’t naive, just temporarily inaccessible. It’s a gentle argument against the modern pose that maturity equals detachment. The sentence even performs its claim: it moves from "you" to "the child's" and back to "your own", staging connection as the engine of joy.