Quotes & Sayings About Adults Not Growing Up

One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible ... — Robin Wasserman

You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me ...
Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work. — Chris Crutcher

By teaching our children to stay in line we create well-behaved followers. While this may make parenting a bit easier, it has enormous costs later in life. These same children grow up to be unhappy adults who desperately want to lead their own lives, yet lack the necessary skills to do so. — Cheryl Richardson

The interesting thing about the Beatles was: The music was one thing, but we kind of symbolized a certain kind of freedom at a time when people of our generation were just growing up and just becoming adults. — Paul McCartney

The reason adults should look as though they are having fun, is to give kids a reason to want to grow up. — Patch Adams

I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One of these days we're gonna have to grow up, have to get real jobs and be adults, someday, just not today. — Kenny Chesney

Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenced by YouTube videos - entertaining cats. — Peter Singer

Because of the consequences of trying to be heard as a child, many adults are unable to take the risk of telling as adults. The fear of the consequences is almost debilitating. The abusers and controllers know that; they rely on it. — Darlene Ouimet

Sometimes when I talk to little children I remind them of the fact that when I was growing up myself, I used to play with frog eggs and tadpoles and I used to walk in the field, I used to literally copy whatever my mother was doing on the land. And that may be the reason why I eventually developed the passion for green and for the Earth. So it is extremely important for adults and especially those who are in charge of cities to make sure that we do not lose touch with the land and with the environment. And especially our children. — Wangari Maathai

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults
cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes. — Lauren Oliver

Note to adults who work with children:

Tiny eyes watching yours
tiny ears hearing every word
tiny tongues repeating every spoken word ....

that is how I learn
that is how I become.

Your senses hold mine.
Your arms hold my every sense.

Your perspective frames mine.

You teach me what the world is
and what the world can be.

My goodness grows from yours.

Take good care ....
tiny hearts beating ... repeating ...
tiny little souls growing. — Cathrine Lodoen

In the melting pot that is America, inclusive trumps exclusive. Whether it's single women, young adults, or minorities, alienating the rapidly growing voting blocs is not smart politics. — Eliot Spitzer

I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.
When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying. — Janet Turpin Myers

I would say that it is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add. — Gregory David Roberts

It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around ...
But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life ...
As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time. — Elif Shafak

Maybe that's what growing up was really all about. Adults always say how complicated life gets as we age, but really, I think we just look for bigger challenges to overcome. Our biggest fears stretch from sleeping without our beloved teddy bear to finding out that we have no purpose in life. Did time, maturity, and overcoming obstacles offer the kind of contentment so evident in Orvin? Or did we just simply give up and surrender to the life we were already living? — Renee Carlino

Gay kids aren't a "plot point" that you can play with. Gay kids are real, actual kids, teenagers, growing up into awesome adults, and they don't have the books they need to reflect that. Growing up, my nose was constantly stuck in a book. Growing up as a lesbian, I was told over and over and over by the lack of gayness in said books that I did not exist. That I wasn't important enough to tell stories about. That I was invisible. Why are we telling our kids this? Why are we telling them that they're a minority, and they don't deserve the same rights as straights, that they're going to grow up in a world that despises them, that the intolerance of humanity will never change, that they're worthless. It's not true. — Sarah Diemer

A parent does not do everything for their kid. A parent that does everything for their kid produces a kid with no self-confidence. If our parents fixed everything for us and did not allow us to do anything on our own, or intervened every single time, we would all grow up to be completely dependent. The reason we grow up to be healthy adults is because our parents played this game of giving us responsibility, disciplining us when necessary, letting us try, letting us fail. — Simon Sinek

Our Peter Pan generation is unhappy. All our lives, we want to grow up -
to be treated like adults, to have freedom to choose. Then we get here and
it turns out being an adult sucks. We pay the bills and taxes, watching others succeed while we are forever waiting for our turn.

We believe we are special, but nothing special has come our way. — Marcella Purnama

Today's churchless adults are not remarkably less favorable toward churches in their community; if anything, there is simply a growing "yawn, — George Barna

Research shows that what works and is healthy for adults also works well for children, if adjusted to be age-appropriate. Children, like adults, do not suffer from a deficiency of white sugar, white flour, junk food, or processed foods. A growing child as well as an adult is hurt by junk foods and benefited by healthy foods. — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did. — Matthew Quick

I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were ... miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around. — John Green

Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive. — Jean-Louis Gassee

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see. — Yoko Ogawa

It was a dangerous profession I had chosen ... because no one likes a funny kid. In fact, adults are scared silly of them and tend to warn children who act out that they are going to wind up in prison or worse. It is only when you grow up that they pay you vast sums of money to make them laugh. — Art Buchwald

Part of me is still waiting to grow up, to be an adult, and the other part knows there is no such thing. — Richard Dreyfuss

We know it is good to receive, and we have been blessed by receiving not only as children, but also as adults. Yet Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35), and part of growing up is learning the art of giving. If we fail to learn this art, we will live unfulfilled lives, and in the end, chains of bondage will replace the bonds that keep our communities together. If we just keep taking or even trading, we will squander ourselves. If we give, we will regain ourselves as fulfilled individuals and flourishing communities. — Miroslav Volf

I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes. — Alice Hoffman

On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because ... Ooooh. Shiny. — Sloane Crosley

I refuse to grow up. I won't become the adult guy. — Charlie Sheen

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die. — Barbara Kingsolver

When a child first catches adults out
when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just
his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. — John Steinbeck

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you. — Emma Cline

Some addicts do not even have basic parenting and instead are beaten, sexually abused, left to be looked after by a dysfunctional 'carer', put in orphan homes or rejected by their community. If you calculate the millions of emotionally neglected children and observe them growing up together trying to 'get by in life', you will understand why many adults (adult children) have addictive personalities. — Christopher Dines

I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now. — Crystal Woods

And then I know I'm being a man, not just some kid who's upset and wants it his way. — Angela Johnson

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic - even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind - then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter. — Holly Black

In life, we are constantly growing.There are no true adults because our life experiences and sometimes unfortunate conditions show us that constant growth is part of the human story. — Henry Johnson Jr

No adult can bear a child's burden or grow up in his stead. — Maria Montessori

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. — Aldo Leopold

Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child's growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? Any man who "can't stop now" to talk with a child upon a topic which, to him is"too silly for anything," should look back to that day upon which that topic was dark and dubious in his own brain. A child who asks nothing will know nothing. That is why that "bump of inquiry" was put on top of our skulls. — Ernest Vincent Wright

Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing. — Victoria Schwab

If nothing has helped you decide, go ask a child. Children know what they need, and more surprisingly, the know what we need. Adults think. Kids respond with their feelings. They don't think about what you will think of their answer, so they just speak the truth-if you can get to them before junior high school age. At that time, they grow up, stop feeling loved, become depressed and start thinking-and what they are thinking about worries me. — Bernie Siegel

I've raised three kids: my wife and I have three kids. I've observed through direct contact the adults they are now is partially the product of where they came from and what we did. With them growing up, but partially how they were wired at birth. — Chris Hadfield

story. A study of more than seven thousand adults showed that introverts who had moved frequently when they were growing up, compared to those who rarely moved, had more difficulty developing strong personal relationships and maintaining them over time; and those difficulties seemed to undermine their happiness and satisfaction with their lives. — Bella DePaulo

All in all, the communally reared children of Israel are far from the emotional disasters that psychoanalytic theory predicted. Neither have they been saved from all personality problems, as the founders of the kibbutz movement had hoped when they freed children from their parents. In any reasonable environment, children seem to grow up to be themselves. There is no evidence that communal rearing with stimulating, caring adults is either the ruination or the salvation of children. — Sandra Scarr

We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside ourskin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes
and knows it. — Frank Pittman

"Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and
actions. In our increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it - and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit. — Dan Gillmor

That we need help is easy to see every time we walk down the street.
The experts confirm what the obscured view in front of us tells us.
They estimate that 64% of adults in the United States are obese and
that this percentage is growing. Even our children are being affected,
as nearly every one in three American children under the age of 18
is overweight. — Jeff Schweitzer

When you're a kid, you have no power. You're physically small and weak, and adults are constantly telling you what to do. So it's incredibly compelling to imagine yourself not only as someone to whom exciting things happen but as someone who is more than those around you. The problem is that then you begin to grow up and realize you're just a lowly muggle. ... Is it possible that all of us, weaned on these stories, end up inevitably disappointed with mundane life as it actually exists? — Paul Waldman

We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don't want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that. — Darnell Lamont Walker

My mom told me, 'don't grow up too quickly; once you're an adult, you're an adult.' — Camilla Belle

Jung said there are four archetypes adults go through, and these archetypes are reflected in the development of my work. The first archetype is the archetype of the athlete, reflecting the time in our adult life when our primary emphasis is on our body - what it looks like, how beautiful it is, how strong it is, and so on. We identify ourselves with our body. We are our body. Growing adults next move to what Jung called the archetype of the warrior. We take our physical bodies out there to do what warriors do. — Wayne Dyer

Many children today are growing up without discipline. As they become adults and the discipline of job or family demands are placed upon them, they do not know how to cope ... children need discipline to be useful members of society. Likewise, God's children need discipline to be useful members of His family. — Billy Graham

It is the teacher's and the lawmaker's responsibility to allow the child to express his feelings about growing up. What happens to a child at that particular age? It is a terribly vulnerable time, and if we provide youths with an environment to
be free, to be expressive, without embarrassing them, without shaming them, they would grow up to be healthy, compassionate adults. Instead, if we force them to "belong, belong, belong," they all become repressed. There is a complete absence of options. — Cyril Wong

Babies breathe a lot more rapidly than adults do, and what's more, they're also growing quickly and so they're absorbing lots more into the body and they're more fragile in terms of development and so on. — Francis Thompson

It's true we all build imaginary prisons for ourselves. Believe that we are trapped behind the invisible bars of the lives we have somehow carelessly constructed for ourselves, despite our youthful promises to ourselves. We see adults who are stagnant and miserable as we grow up. They graffiti the walls behind them with their mistakes and we swear secret oaths that we will heed those warnings. We're much too clever, we know all the shortcuts and the back alleys. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn't sure I could do that when it was my turn. — Barbara Hall

It was like adults had their own little world that we weren't allowed to be a part of, and it didn't make sense because we were part of the world, too. — Susan Pogorzelski

Do we honestly believe that hopeless kids growing up under the harsh new rules will turn out to be chaste, studious, responsible adults? On the contrary, by limiting welfare, job training, education and nutritious food, won't we plant the seeds for another bumper crop of out-of-wedlock moms, deadbeat dads and worse? — Richard Stolley