Parenting & Family Quote by Philip Larkin

Larkin’s line has the chill of a public-service announcement delivered by someone who doesn’t quite believe in public service. He starts with a humane-sounding premise - kids and adults are connected because childhood is an unfinished adult - then uses that connection to justify a bracing hierarchy. “For this they may be forgiven much” sounds generous until you notice the bargain underneath: forgiveness is granted not because children are vulnerable or imaginative, but because they are temporarily inconvenient. They’re tolerated as works-in-progress.

The sting is in “inferior.” Larkin chooses a word that refuses sentimentality and dares the reader to flinch. He isn’t describing a sweet difference in perspective; he’s reinstating adulthood as the standard, childhood as the deficiency. That’s the rhetorical trick: by framing inferiority as necessary (“or there is no incentive to grow up”), he makes a social prejudice look like natural law. It’s a tidy, almost bureaucratic logic applied to messy human development.

Context matters. Postwar Britain, with its stiff-lipped authority and suspicion of indulgence, is all over this: growth as duty, maturity as credential, feeling as something you earn after you’ve proven you can manage it. Larkin’s poetry often needles the myths that make ordinary life bearable - romance, progress, even self-improvement. Here, he’s exposing the implicit cruelty in “growing up” as an ideology: adulthood needs children to be “less” so adulthood can keep claiming to be “more.”