Childhood v. Adulthood Essay

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“For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.”

― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”

― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.”

― James Thurber

“When you're a child you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you're an adult you realize that's the worst part of it.”

― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else. I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.”

― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.”

― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

Read the six quotations above, each of which offers a different perspective on adolescence, loss, freedom, responsibility, and self-knowledge. Taken together, they suggest that the transition from childhood to adulthood is not defined by age alone, but by a shift in how a person understands their world and their place in it. In a five-paragraph essay, develop an argument that answers the following question: 

What do you believe is the defining difference between childhood and adulthood? 

You may draw on one or more of the quotations to help shape your thinking, but your essay should ultimately present your own claim about this transition. Consider ideas such as innocence versus knowledge, dependence versus responsibility and autonomy, belief versus doubt, freedom versus obligation, or security versus uncertainty. You may also use personal experience, observation, or examples from literature and/or current events to support your ideas. 

Your essay should: 

• Present a clear thesis in the introduction
• Develop the claim of that thesis with well-explained evidence and reasoning in the body paragraphs
• Acknowledge and address complexity (the transition is never clean or simple)
• Conclude by reflecting on why this distinction matters as you move toward adulthood yourself