to 16 or so – and finally turn into those fully finished products: adults. Up until

then, our growth is the subject of quite a lot of collective fascination. Twentieth-century

psychology, beginning with the work of the Swiss clinician Jean Piaget, pioneered an

approach to child development that meticulously identified and labelled every principal stage

an average infant might go through on the developmental journey of its earliest years.

Thanks to this work, we now know that at six months, a child will be able to sit up on

its own, pick up a small object (such as a raisin) using a thumb and forefinger and recognise

its own image in a mirror, though it will most likely take another three months before

it can drink from a cup on its own and understand simple requests. By two, it will start to

say 'I' and 'you' and it will probably be able to put on a hat by itself. Around

four, one can expect it to use sentences several words long and quite possibly invent an imaginary

friend (an achievement that belongs to what Piaget called the Symbolic Function Substage).

Between the ages of four and seven, children begin to grasp abstract concepts like 'time'

and 'a country' but typically make mistakes around the use of 'less than' and 'more

than'. Parents, uncles, aunts and grand-parents tend to be deeply interested in these developmental

milestones – which become the stuff of family legend. However, after about 16, the attention

society pays to the maturation of an individual becomes ever more coarsely grained. The focus

shifts to external, material matters: we track what someone gets in their university degree,

what job they secure and how they progress up the corporate hierarchy. Growing up becomes

synonymous with getting ahead. Yet, in truth, we never stop having opportunities to grow

in an emotional – rather than material or physical way. Perhaps between the ages of

19 and 21, without anyone really focusing on this happening, we may radically rethink

our view of how to handle our parents' shortcomings. Or our view of envy takes a leap forward in

the middle of our 23rd year. Or, as we approach 33, lying in bed early one morning in a hotel,

we amend our sense of who is to blame in certain relationship difficulties. We may look more or

less the same, but inside, slow, unheralded moments of emotional growth can be going on.

Unfortunately, we have nothing like the clear, detailed stages to measure ourselves against

that babies and young children enjoy – and that might give us the encouragement we would

need to note and foster stages of growth. Yet, every adult life contains the potential

to acquire new emotional skills, each in its own way as significant as a child mastering a

quirk of language (in English, for instance, saying 'I thought rather than I thinked')

or learning to ride a bicycle. To develop emotionally involves a range of steps: learning

to understand and sympathise with oneself; to take proper stock of one's childhood

influences; to communicate flaws and eccentricities to others in good time, to interpret others

beyond what they have directly said to us, to recognise the hard edges of reality without

being destroyed by them, to accept one's needs for consolation and assistance, to achieve

a necessary degree of confidence, to know how to despair without wholly giving up on

existence… We can imagine plotting the inner journey like islands, each one of them marked

by settlements, which we should take the trouble systematically to work our way around, as

we might the cities of Renaissance Italy, or the beauty spots on the Pacific Highway.

We'd tell our friends excitedly that we'd learnt about Emotional Translation or had

achieved excellent grades in Communication. We might throw a party when we'd learnt

how to do Cheerful Despair. Despite misleading external signs, we aren't, in fact, ever

done with the tricky business of becoming that hugely important thing: an emotionally

mature person or, to put it another, simpler way, a real grown-up.

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