Motherhood Quote by Victoria Secunda

Secunda’s line lands with the bracing clarity of someone who’s watched families up close and refused the sentimental gloss. The first sentence looks like practical advice, almost managerial: cooperation turns parenting from a relay race run in combat boots into something survivable. But the real thrust is the second sentence, where she flips the usual parenting script. Kids don’t learn love from lectures; they learn it from the atmosphere.

Her intent is quietly corrective. In cultures that treat romantic life as adult business and childrearing as a separate, sealed compartment, Secunda argues the wall is imaginary. The subtext is that “being good parents” can’t be reduced to showing up for soccer games or enforcing bedtime. The way parents treat each other is part of the curriculum, and it’s the part children can’t unsee. Even silence teaches. Even “we’re staying together for the kids” teaches - sometimes that intimacy is endurance, that conflict is permanent weather, that affection is optional.

Context matters: Secunda wrote in an era when divorce rates rose, therapy-speak entered the mainstream, and the ideal of the intact nuclear family was being renegotiated in public. Her framing doesn’t moralize divorce; it moralizes denial. If parents can’t stand each other, the child receives a long-term lesson about what love looks like when it curdles - and that lesson arrives not as trauma in a single scene but as daily, low-grade instruction.