Children: You spend the first 2 years of their life teaching them to walk and talk. Then you spend the next 16 telling them to sit down and shut-up.

The quip highlights a perceived contradiction in childrearing and schooling: early childhood is devoted to encouraging independence—mobility and speech—while later years often emphasize compliance, quiet, and conformity. By compressing parenting into a stark timeline (“first 2 years” versus “next 16”), it satirizes how institutions and adults may value order over curiosity, and how children’s natural energy and questioning can be treated as disruptions. The humor depends on exaggeration, but it points to real tensions between nurturing self-expression and managing groups, suggesting that adults sometimes suppress the very capacities they worked hard to develop.