Parenting & Family Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

A line like this lands with Ishiguro's trademark calm menace: it sounds like a simple psychological observation, then opens into an indictment of how we manufacture “normal” adulthood. The key move is the phrase “have to be deceived.” Not “often are,” not “tend to be,” but a bleak necessity. Childhood, in this view, isn’t innocence; it’s a managed illusion, curated by adults the way states curate national myths. The deception is framed as a kind of mercy, yet the sentence refuses to let us enjoy that comfort. If deception is required, what does that say about the world awaiting the child?

The subtext is that trauma isn’t just an accidental harm; it’s the default outcome of seeing too clearly, too soon. Ishiguro’s fiction repeatedly circles this dynamic: narrators who survive by misunderstanding their own lives, societies that run on collective bad faith, people who cling to stories that keep them functional. The line also implicates adults as collaborators. “Deceived” suggests an agent doing the deceiving - parents, teachers, institutions - and “grow up” turns maturation into a process of controlled disclosure, like drip-feeding reality to keep the system stable.

Context matters because Ishiguro writes from the pressure point between personal memory and public narrative: postwar restraint, British politeness, the quiet violence of repression. The sentence isn’t arguing for lying to kids so much as exposing an ugly bargain: we trade truth for survivability, and call the bargain love.