Growing
OLD is
MANDATORYGrowing
UP is
OPTIONALThis whole nonsense about "People should just let kids grow up!" is a whole bunch of BALONEY! Not every kid wants to grow up. I'm a grown young adult and I still don't want to grow up. And the fact that we're all here on this board talking about a hobby we all partake in that involves children's toys and stories shows that, to some extent, we all don't want to grow up either, as that would entail giving up our children's playthings and fiction since all of it is really rooted in childish things not originally meant for grown ups.
All this stuff about cuteness or silliness being unmanly or sinful are sure signs of insecurity in one's masculinity, for it takes a real man to not be bothered by any of this. If a man feels threatened by something as harmless as a Mr. Potato Head, then
that man is the one showing weakness and vulnerability, not the men who are unaffected by it. They're strong, they're manly, and they're mature,
because they're tough enough to grin and bear it. Those who aren't are scared and immature, and need to follow their own advice and grow up a little more, themselves.
Acclaimed writer C.S. Lewis once put it best when he wrote:
“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
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