Parenting Quote by Frank Pittman

Power and prestige don not automatically buy adulthood; they just buy better camouflage. Frank Pittman takes aim at the quietly tyrannical force of parental approval, arguing that even the most outwardly competent person can remain psychologically on probation. The line is blunt on purpose: it punctures the American self-myth of rugged independence by suggesting that the real gatekeepers of maturity are often two ordinary people back home, still holding the emotional deed.

The intent is less to flatter parents than to expose a common trap. "Function as an adult" is clinical language for something messy: decision-making, intimacy, risk, self-trust. Pittman implies that some adults keep performing life for an internal audience, seeking an elusive final grade. "However powerful and successful" widens the target to CEOs, politicians, and overachievers who look sovereign but are still bargaining with childhood: if I win enough, they will finally be satisfied.

The subtext is about dependency disguised as duty. Parental dissatisfaction becomes a portable authority figure, a moral court that never adjourns. It can drive workaholism, people-pleasing, or a brittle kind of competence that collapses when praise stops. The gendered "his" hints at a particular script: men taught to measure worth through approval, then shocked to discover the scoreboard follows them into middle age.

Contextually, Pittman wrote in an era when family-systems thinking was popularizing the idea that adult problems often have family-shaped roots. The quote is a provocation: if you want adulthood, stop litigating your parents verdict and start issuing your own.