"We must return optimism to our parenting. To focus on the joys, not the hassles; the love, not the disappointments; the common sense, not the complexities"
About this Quote
Gosman’s line reads like a small manifesto against the modern sport of anxious parenting. The pivot word is “return”: he implies optimism isn’t naive, it’s something that’s been misplaced, traded away for a culture of hyper-monitoring, performance metrics, and doomscrolling through everyone else’s curated family life. The sentence is built as a set of contrasts that feel deliberately domestic and tactile: “joys” versus “hassles,” “love” versus “disappointments.” He’s not denying that hassles and disappointments exist; he’s arguing that they’ve become the default lens, the story we tell ourselves about raising kids.
The subtext is quietly rebellious. “Common sense” is doing double duty here: it’s a dig at expert-driven complexity (the endless advice economy, the parenting-industrial complex) and a call to reclaim parental authority from algorithms, books, and judgmental peer cultures. By pairing “common sense” against “complexities,” he frames overthinking as a kind of emotional tax - one that drains pleasure and confidence.
The intent isn’t to romanticize parenting but to reorder attention: optimism as a discipline, not a mood. The repetition of “not” works like a reset button, a rhetorical tidying-up that mirrors the everyday labor of family life. Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st century backdrop where parenting is increasingly treated as a high-stakes project. Gosman offers a counter-script: less crisis management, more presence; less fear of getting it wrong, more permission to actually enjoy the people you’re raising.
The subtext is quietly rebellious. “Common sense” is doing double duty here: it’s a dig at expert-driven complexity (the endless advice economy, the parenting-industrial complex) and a call to reclaim parental authority from algorithms, books, and judgmental peer cultures. By pairing “common sense” against “complexities,” he frames overthinking as a kind of emotional tax - one that drains pleasure and confidence.
The intent isn’t to romanticize parenting but to reorder attention: optimism as a discipline, not a mood. The repetition of “not” works like a reset button, a rhetorical tidying-up that mirrors the everyday labor of family life. Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st century backdrop where parenting is increasingly treated as a high-stakes project. Gosman offers a counter-script: less crisis management, more presence; less fear of getting it wrong, more permission to actually enjoy the people you’re raising.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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