Parenting & Family Quote by Hugh Lofting

There’s a sly rebuke tucked into Lofting’s phrasing: “almost as a distinct species” lands like a raised eyebrow at adult self-importance. He’s not merely noting that kids get treated differently; he’s diagnosing a habit of mind that turns difference into distance. “Classify” is the tell. It evokes cabinets, labels, and the bureaucratic itch to tidy what’s messy and alive. Children, in this view, aren’t people in progress but creatures to be managed, studied, and spoken about in a separate vocabulary of “cute,” “irrational,” “innocent,” “difficult.” The subtext is that adult authority often depends on pretending the gap is natural, even biological, rather than social and political.

Lofting wrote in a period when modern childhood was being aggressively invented: compulsory schooling, new child-rearing theories, the rise of psychology, a growing children’s publishing industry. All of it claimed to take children seriously while also cordoning them off. His line exposes how easily “protecting children” becomes a pretext for denying them agency, complexity, and voice. The word “always” widens the indictment beyond any one era; it’s a recurring adult convenience.

Coming from a writer best known for imaginative empathy (Doctor Dolittle’s cross-species understanding), the jab gains extra bite: if we can grant animals interiority in fiction, why do we keep treating kids as if they’re fundamentally alien? Lofting is urging readers to see childhood not as a separate category to control, but as a neighboring country we keep insisting is another planet.