Parents' Day sold poorly and has been largely forgotten, save for some recognition as an early gay American novel.

In the United States during the era of this book's publication, homosexuality was deemed a mental illness with deleterious effects on health.

[1] By the time of the book's publication, its author, Paul Goodman had developed a reputation for publishing on a panoply of topics.

[2] In Parents' Day, an unnamed male in his thirties begins teaching at a private school early in World War II.

[6] When Davy seeks to have sex with a female student, the narrator tells the headmaster that they should provide contraceptives and facilitate an occasion for the pair.

[9] From a disciple of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, Goodman learned Reichian techniques, which he performed as a set of unsequenced exercises rather than an ordered program.

[7] An Iowa Journal of Literary Studies review saw Parents' Day as an honest view into Goodman's faults as a developing educator.

[13] Goodman showed a lack of self-awareness as an author, literary critic Kingsley Widmer thought, by making declarations at odds with his narrator's actions, such as the narrator saying he was "a good teacher" or defending his seductions while otherwise showing "predatory sexuality, vanity, caprice, self-pity, and contempt for others".

[27] Widmer criticized what he described as "portentously ruminative writing" with a vague, confessional tone in which the narrator is confused about his self-perception as "natural" or "sick".

[30] The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, however, appreciated the book's balance of humor, such as how the author's serious, existential, questioning tone juxtaposes with his enthusiasm for sex, often exacerbating the former.

[8] Literary critic Kingsley Widmer said Goodman's public endorsement of adolescent sexuality was both jarring for the 1940s and novel among Americans.

[31] Among gay novels, the progressive school's permissive setting and general tolerance for the narrator's homosexuality (but not pederasty) made for a more evocative memoir, wrote Roger Austin.

[19] Stan Sulkes's survey of Goodman's long fiction more directly said the book was "largely forgotten" and not even collected by research libraries.