If you’ve been listening to any country music at all over the past few months, you’ve most likely heard the dramatic and powerful ballad “Downside of Growing Up” by the female country duo Maddie & Tae. The catchy lyrics of this sentimental song may stick in your head, but they also seem to stand true when it comes to your life. The gradual transition between adolescence, living under your parents’ roof, eating home cooked meals, going to high school, and hanging out with childhood friends to young adulthood, moving to college, pursuing a career, and living away from home on your own for the first time is not always smooth and easy. Not to mention, once college is over, you enter the infamously scary and vast “real world” in which you are expected to land a steady job, buy a house or apartment, pay your own bills, buy your own groceries and conjure up your own meals, and possibly get married and start your own family. Eventually, the goal we all seem to be being pushed towards is the one down the conveyor belt toward becoming a successful, mature, financially stable and a full-fledged adult.

In high school, many of us looked forward to freedom from our parents, curfew-less Saturday night shenanigans, or finally graduating college and being done with school for good, but have you ever stopped and thought, “maybe Peter Pan was right… I’m not ready to grow up?” If you’ve ever found yourself wishing you could go back to a time when you had a nap time built into your daily schedule, or when your biggest concern in the world was what toy was going to come with your kid’s meal at McDonald’s, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Growing up is inevitable, but there are definite downsides we all have to go through as the time on our clocks tick by.

First of all, growing up can go hand-in-hand with growing apart oftentimes. This can mean growing apart from family members, friends, and familiar parts of our lives, in general. Leaving for college and/or moving away from your home can certainly bring on the beginning of a lot of this “growing apart.” When you’re used to being able to run upstairs and into your mom’s arms for a cozy hug whenever life knocks you down, or watching football games with your dad on Sunday afternoons after morning church service, it can be tough to adjust to not being able to readily access these familiar comforts once you move out on your own. Granted, you will likely come home to visit once in awhile or spend vacations/breaks at home, but the fact of the matter simply is that things will never be the same as they were before. The bonds of friendships too, tend to weaken as college commences. Many of our high school friends will not attend the same college as we do, and it doesn’t take long before talking to each other everyday becomes talking to each other once a month. However, when other friendships fade, usually new friendships are blossoming. Still, we can choose whether or not to water the vines of our old friendships or let them die off; the power is in our hands.

Secondly, the number of responsibilities imposed upon us increases as we grow up too. For most children, typical responsibilities include keeping track of our own backpacks, keeping our rooms tidy, and performing chores around the house for our parents. As teenagers, we are given more responsibilities, such as driving, maintaining part-time jobs and saving money for our futures, and deciding what it is we want to do with the rest of our lives. In adulthood, bills, marriage, family, and our career/job seem to hit us with an all-time high number of responsibilities, and we wish we were back in the days of doing the dishes for mom after Sunday night supper. With all of these responsibilities, the pressure to be successful and high-achieving adds to our load too. That being said, many of these responsibilities, though stressful, lead to greater joys in our lives. For example, having a family can be stressful, but having a loving spouse and/or children are often people's greatest sources of happiness when they look back in retrospect on their lives.

Lastly, growing up means losing a part of who we once were. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are plenty of adults out there who choose to still behave like big children, but still, they can never truly be a child ever again. Personally, I feel that the most significant reason that growing up can be so difficult is because we realize it means we will never be able to go back to being as young as we once were, no matter how young we act. There’s the popular saying, “you’ll never be as young as you are right now,” and to be frank, that saying hits the nail right on the head. From the time we are born, until the moment we take our last breath, we are dying. Each day we go to sleep older than we were when we woke up that morning, and the pattern continues throughout the entirety of our lives. Who we are as children is not who we are as adults; that is just a fact of life. This is why we need to treat each day with significance, even if it is just another regular, boring Tuesday. None of us will live forever; we are all given a limited number of days that will eventually run out. Make each day worth it.

Overall, it’s fairly clear to see that growing up is not something that’s always easy to come to terms with. Sometimes, we can’t remember when our juice box and tricycle became our coffee mug and mini van. However, we cannot stop our clocks from ticking, and we cannot stop ourselves from aging. It’s a fact of life; every second after we’re born, we are dying. We can, however, change our mentalities towards growing up. At the end of the day, we all have to grow up, but growing up doesn’t have to mean giving up.