Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.

Soon ripe, soon rotten.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.

Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.

SIR OLIVER. Odds my Life — I am not sorry that He has run out of the course a little — for my Part, I hate to see dry Prudence clinging to the green juices of youth — ’tis like ivy round a sapling and spoils the growth of the Tree.

4238. Spare the Rod, and spoil the Child.

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting (p17)

Showing something before it becomes complete spoils that thing.

How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste.

I'll say one thing about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that Life's a pretty rotten thing as quick as anything I can think of.

He spoilt it -- he spoke.

Things have a way of turning out so badly.

A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginning and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.