Quote:
Originally Posted by GunmouthGrace
Always did like this one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by C.S. Lewis
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Batlord
I wish vastly more people would accept that. Worrying about being an adult in children and adolescents is like little kids wearing their parents oversized shoes to feel less like children, and I think a fair majority of adults never outgrow that mentality. It's like the entire human race is trying to fake it till they make it as far as being mature adults.
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Many of us also have been instilled with a great deal of guilt/shame over enjoying anything that isn't ~productive. (I've met so many people of all ages who have seemingly forgotten how to just
have fun without making everything as tedious and joyless as possible.) I know that many overbearing helicopter-type parents who suffocated and coddled their children aggressively will, once their child gets to a certain age (let's say 13), pull a 180 and say
"OK you're an adult now! No more non-scheduled fun! Oh and btw I'm not going to equip you with any skills or grant you any privacy/personal agency/emotional support of any kind!" But they'll continue to infantilize them (and yet! punish them for displaying any sort of totally age-appropriate emotion) even when they're 17 years old. It must create a weird sort of cognitive dissonance. That wasn't quite my experience growing up, though I have abstained from many, many things that I likely would have enjoyed very much if not for that kneejerk aversion toward anything others would possibly deem too childlike or goofy. It's depressing all around.