QuoteProject
In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
Thomas Szasz
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote critiques societal trends of reversing the roles and responsibilities typically associated with children and adults.

Thomas Szasz highlights a concerning trend in modern society where children are granted freedoms and choices often reserved for adults, while adults are stripped of their autonomy and responsibilities. This inversion leads to a generation of unruly children lacking discipline and adults who are immature and irresponsible, questioning the very nature of growth and maturity in societal roles.

Themes

ChildrenAdultsResponsibilitySocietyMaturity

In practice

Example use cases

During a parenting seminar, one might quote Szasz to emphasize the importance of teaching children responsibility.

More from Thomas Szasz

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.
Thomas SzaszRead
Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.
Thomas SzaszRead
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
Thomas SzaszRead
In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
Thomas SzaszRead
Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.
Thomas SzaszRead
Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
Thomas SzaszRead

Similar quotes

How often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.
William MorrisRead
Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: through no merit of ours, but by his mercy, WE HAVE BEEN RESTORED to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of Grace
Brennan ManningRead
It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
Clifford GeertzRead
He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
Virginia WoolfRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.