Parenting & Family Quote by Christopher Morley

Morley’s line lands like a toast that turns into a roast: the complaint is absurd on its face, yet uncomfortably accurate in the way it names a modern ache. “Bad luck” is the bait, a phrase borrowed from the vocabulary of accidents and misfortune. Then comes the punchline reversal: the tragedy is not illness, scandal, or failure, but the perfectly normal outcome everyone signs up for. The joke works because it treats adulthood as a kind of theft.

The intent is affectionate cynicism. Morley isn’t attacking children; he’s mocking the parental habit of narrating ordinary life as personal loss. Parents want credit for the hard parts and permanence for the sweet parts, but childhood is a temporary lease. The line needles sentimentality by framing growth as betrayal. It’s also a sly admission of powerlessness: despite all the labor, rules, and hopes, the central project ends with kids leaving the category that made them “ours.”

Subtextually, it’s about time and identity. Parenting offers a role with built-in meaning; when children “grow up,” the parent loses not just daily closeness but a reliable self-definition. Morley compresses that existential shift into domestic comedy, the way a good essayist smuggles melancholy through a laugh.

Context matters: writing in early-20th-century America, Morley is part of a literary culture that prized the epigram as social critique. The line glances at a bourgeois ideal of family stability while acknowledging its hidden cost: the household’s success is measured by its own dissolution.