jepsen1977: I'm just gonna leave this C.S. Lewis quote here for you to ponder:
"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." - C.S. Lewis, Three Ways
of Writing for Children (1952).
I was going to respond to the thread referring to this exact quote. Thanks for saving me the trouble of trying to remember it.
I'll also add that elsewhere in the same piece of writing he pointed out that it's silly to measure how
up someone is by how much of their childhood they've thrown away. Abandoning certain "childish" things you used to is an unfortunate side effect of growing up (which is a good thing overall), and is not in itself growing up.