Parenting & Family Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley’s line is a neat little trap: it sounds like a complaint about women, but its real target is the cozy bargain adults strike to avoid adulthood. “Encourage” and “scold” are paired like a rigged game. First comes permission, even reward, for a kind of performed immaturity; then comes moral policing when that performance becomes inconvenient. The bite is in the suggestion that the cycle isn’t accidental. It’s a domestic theater with roles that flatter both sides until it doesn’t.

The phrasing matters. “Childish” isn’t “childlike.” It doesn’t mean wonder or play; it means irresponsibility dressed up as charm. Cooley implies men are happy to be “encouraged” because childishness can be a way of dodging consequence while still collecting affection. And women, in this formulation, aren’t simply duped or cruel; they’re cast as managers of the emotional household economy, granting small indulgences (be silly, be needy, be taken care of) and then enforcing standards when those indulgences threaten stability.

As a mid-to-late 20th-century aphorist, Cooley is writing in an era when gender roles were both rigid and quietly renegotiated: the “man-child” becomes a recognizable figure, and the “nag” stereotype remains the ready-made villain. The subtext is darker than the quip: heterosexual intimacy can become a loop of dependency and resentment, where caretaking looks like love until it starts to feel like parenting. Cooley’s cynicism lands because it implicates everyone in the choreography, even as it dares you to choose which part is supposedly the joke.