Parenting & Family Quote by James Broughton

Aging usually arrives with paperwork: mortgages, obituaries, the slow narrowing of what you’re “allowed” to like. Broughton’s line sidesteps that whole script with a sly, almost theatrical cheerfulness. “Happy to report” sounds like a status update delivered to some invisible committee of adulthood, as if joy needs clearance. That choice of phrasing is the wink: he’s mocking the culture that treats play as a guilty hobby rather than a serious way of being alive.

The subtext hinges on “inner child,” a term that can get flattened into self-help cliche. In Broughton’s hands, it’s closer to an artistic ethic. Calling it “ageless” refuses the sentimental idea that childhood is a lost country you can only visit in memory. Instead, he proposes a continuity of appetite: curiosity, mischief, erotic energy, the willingness to be foolish in public. For a director and poet associated with countercultural currents, that’s not just personal reassurance; it’s a creative manifesto. If your inner child is intact, your imagination hasn’t been domesticated.

Context matters: Broughton lived through eras that trained people to be compliant - war, Cold War moral policing, the disciplining of queer desire. To claim an “ageless” inner child is to claim immunity from that narrowing. The sentence works because it’s buoyant without being naive. It doesn’t deny time; it refuses time’s authority over delight.