Parenting & Family Quote by Randall Jarrell

The sting in Jarrell's line is how effortlessly it flips the usual hierarchy: adults aren’t wiser; they’re amnesiacs. He frames the insight from the child’s vantage point, which makes the “obvious fact” feel both devastating and quietly comic. Of course it’s obvious to the child. The surprise is that it isn’t obvious to the grown-ups who keep insisting they “remember exactly.”

The intent is less nostalgia than indictment. Jarrell isn’t romanticizing childhood as pure; he’s pointing at a specific adult failure of imagination. Forgetting here isn’t merely losing details (the games, the fears, the scale of a hallway at night). It’s forgetting the logic of dependency and the rawness of being interpreted by people who hold all the power. Adults don’t just misread children; they rewrite them, translating messy feelings into neat lessons: “You’re tired,” “You’re being dramatic,” “You’ll understand when you’re older.” That condescension is what the child registers as betrayal.

Subtextually, the quote is also about culture. “Grown-ups” implies institutions: schools, families, governments, critics. Jarrell, a mid-century poet and sharp observer of American life, lived through eras that demanded adult certainty - war, bureaucracy, a hardening consensus about normalcy. In that atmosphere, childhood becomes a problem to manage rather than a reality to enter. The line works because it’s simple enough to sound like a child’s complaint, yet precise enough to expose how adulthood often protects itself: by calling its own forgetting “maturity.”