The latter half of the following sentence of Time magazine’s article, “Playing Favorites” (October 3), which deals with the commonly observed favoritism of parents to one particular child, is puzzling to me:
My father’s hostility toward my baby brother ought to have doomed him in my mother’s eye too. A child who’s already being ill treated by one parent has hurdles to overcome just getting out of childhood in one piece, much less making it to a procreative adulthood. Best for a mom with years of child rearing ahead to cut her losses now.”
I have two questions:
- I don’t get the idea of “one piece.” Does it mean “one brood” - a group of siblings?
- Is the last line — “Best for a mom with years of child rearing ahead to cut her losses now” — a valid sentence? Isn’t something (verb) missing? My MS Word spelling-checker keeps marking it as a “fragment.”