The desire to grow up — the primary role of a parent

The most fundamental task of a parent is not protection or provision alone — it is transmitting the desire to grow up. The child needs to see, in the adults around them, that adulthood contains something worth moving towards. This cannot be taught. It must be lived in front of them.

Research origins

Philippe Jacquet’s doctoral research examined the impact of the father-son relationship on the son’s relationship with food and his body — and the development of eating disorders. In exploring what fathers transmit to sons, a central question emerged: what is the most important thing a parent actually does?

The answer came, unexpectedly, from Peter Pan.

The Captain Hook problem

Peter Pan is the eternal boy who refuses to grow up. Clinically, he is a portrait of developmental arrest. But consider his world. The only adult of any prominence is Captain Hook — threatening, bitter, consumed by grievance. Why would any child look at that and think: yes, I want that?

Peter Pan doesn’t refuse adulthood because he is broken. He refuses it because no one has shown him anything in adulthood worth wanting. The lost boys are lost for the same reason.

What parents actually transmit

The primary role of a parent is to make the child desire to grow up — to show them that adult life contains passion, freedom, achievement, love. This cannot be delivered as a message. It must be lived as a life.

A parent who tells their child adulthood is wonderful, you’ll see while visibly enduring every day as obligation transmits a very different lesson. The child reads the life, not the words. Philippe hears this regularly: patients describing a father always working — weekends, evenings, work trips — not animated by what he was doing, not visibly alive to anything beyond the grind. The child concluded, without words, that this is what growing up looks like.

The clinical consequence

When growing up is not made desirable, the cost is psychological and emotional. The body grows regardless. What does not arrive automatically is the willingness to inhabit adult life fully — to carry its responsibilities, to engage with its freedoms without retreating.

When that willingness is absent, the cost is significant. It presents most commonly as addiction, eating disorders, or other mental health difficulties that carry, beneath their surface symptoms, the signature of a self that never quite made the crossing into adulthood.

“The most important thing a parent does is not protect their child from difficulty. It is show them that there is something on the other side worth growing into. You cannot tell a child that adulthood is good. You have to live it in front of them — with passion, with freedom, with something that looks like a life worth having. Because if they decide not to grow up — emotionally, psychologically — they will pay a very heavy price.” — Philippe Jacquet

Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.