# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 21

THAT was the time when Alice began to realize that Robert was beginning to grow up.
One of the things that is the very hardest for mothers to find out is just how old their boy children are. The calendar and the clock have nothing to do with this, and it is partly the fault of parents that this is true. From earliest infancy they implore their boys to "be a man." That glorious goal is pointed out to a boy baby from the moment he can understand anything. He is not only told to "be a man", but to "be a man like Father." I often wonder how the fathers bear it; I often wonder how they can stand there, so smug and contented, when this ideal of conduct is suggested to their babies. Don't they really see themselves? Aren't there some of them who have a sudden, beneficent impulse to exterminate their own sons if the feat of growing up to be "a man like father" is all that awaits the child? How can they bear the adoring gaze of their sons?
Some little boys have a trick of looking so much more like real men with all the qualities that we love to think of as belonging to the most manly than grown-up men do. You see them stamping down the street, still in skirts; a man in the fullness of his powers couldn't have exemplified more fully the finer masculine traits.
Alice often wondered at herself and at Tom. She wondered why they never told Sara to "be a woman." No one tells little girls to "hurry up and be a woman ​like Mother." She used to wonder if this were because of the greater modesty or the greater ambition of mothers, or if, poor things, they saw more vividly what children, and marriage, and living, and time, had done to them, and, seeing these things, it would be an irony to wish for one's little daughter that she should "grow up like mother."
Old-fashioned people used to tell little girls to behave like little ladies. This ideal of conduct didn't appeal to Alice any more than to most mothers of to-day, that is, it didn't intellectually appeal to her. Though there is hardly a mother living, if the truth were known, who wouldn't be glad if there were off days when her children would behave like little ladies and gentlemen—a horrible sight, if it happened every day, but comforting to the nerves of elders if it only happened once in a while.
It is perhaps because we don't urge them to be so grown-up that the grown-up qualities in little girls are less hard to deal with. They take care of you when you're sick sometimes, with unconscious maternal gestures that almost break your heart. They show passionate interest in dress when they are so tiny that you wouldn't think they knew a shoe from a glove. But all this isn't hard to cope with.
With boys it's different. From being grubby, tousle-headed small boys they suddenly grow up before your eyes and remain grown-up half an hour at a time. They show this growing up by having all the symptoms of that trait called "manly dignity." Now manly dignity can be anything from a proper self-respect to a jealous sort of vanity that makes the possessor walk along with a perpetual chip placed ostentatiously on his shoulder. Then, after they have made this ten or fifteen years' jump into the future back they go again, ​and perhaps end up their surprising flight with a two-year-old fit of temper accompanied by foot stampings.
They are especially apt to do this if their parents don't realize what was the matter with them in the first place. Then, of course, they are called "naughty boys" and the very least that happens to them is that they are sent out of the room—often sent out, I think, because if a parent doesn't get into a fit of temper over a child's broken heart, life would be too difficult. That sort of anger is the only protection some mothers have between them and the despair that comes from knowing that they haven't acted as they should—and when it comes to children one never does act as one should.