"You can never spend enough time with children"
About this Quote
In a culture that treats parenting like a logistics problem, Dwayne Hickman’s line lands as a small rebellion: the scarce resource isn’t money or even patience, it’s attention. “You can never spend enough time with children” isn’t advice delivered from a podium; it’s the plainspoken urgency of someone who watched family life get repackaged into schedules, carpools, and “quality time” as a guilt-management strategy.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Never” and “enough” turn time into something you can’t optimize. It refuses the comforting idea that you can make up for absence with a bigger gesture later. Hickman, an actor whose career was built in the era when TV sold an idealized home life, speaks from inside the machine that helped invent modern family mythology. That context matters: entertainment has long offered parents a proxy for presence - a wholesome half-hour that pretends to stand in for real companionship. His quote pulls the curtain back on that substitution.
The subtext is also a critique of adult self-importance. We like to imagine children as resilient, easily amused, “fine” with whatever’s left over. Hickman insists the opposite: kids experience time as love, and they keep receipts. The line is sentimental on the surface, but its edge is moral - it implies that “busy” is often just a socially acceptable way to say “elsewhere.”
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Never” and “enough” turn time into something you can’t optimize. It refuses the comforting idea that you can make up for absence with a bigger gesture later. Hickman, an actor whose career was built in the era when TV sold an idealized home life, speaks from inside the machine that helped invent modern family mythology. That context matters: entertainment has long offered parents a proxy for presence - a wholesome half-hour that pretends to stand in for real companionship. His quote pulls the curtain back on that substitution.
The subtext is also a critique of adult self-importance. We like to imagine children as resilient, easily amused, “fine” with whatever’s left over. Hickman insists the opposite: kids experience time as love, and they keep receipts. The line is sentimental on the surface, but its edge is moral - it implies that “busy” is often just a socially acceptable way to say “elsewhere.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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