I don’t think there’s anything more important than making peace before it’s too late. And it almost always falls to the child to try to move toward the parent.

Fonda emphasizes reconciliation as an urgent, time-bound moral task: relationships can end abruptly through death, illness, or estrangement, and unresolved conflict hardens into permanent regret. The second sentence adds a hard, psychologically realistic observation about family dynamics—parents may be entrenched in pride, denial, or generational habits, so the emotional labor of repair often shifts to the child, even when the child was hurt. The quote therefore frames “making peace” less as excusing wrongdoing than as choosing connection and closure over winning. It also implies agency: the child can initiate contact, set terms, and seek understanding before the opportunity disappears.