Songfacts®:

• Jackson wrote this after his eldest daughter, Mattie, left home for college. He told Billboard magazine: "If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh, yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write songs that are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody. It's a typical story of a young person leaving home."
• The Boot asked Jackson if being in a houseful of women, it was hard to relate to what Mattie was going through when she left home for the first time. He replied: "I've had to live with women all my life. I grew up with four older sisters, and I was the baby and the only boy. Now I'm in a house with four, plus a couple working around there, so I guess I grew up not thinking any different about being around women. Maybe it gave me a little more understanding and perspective. I can't say it did, but I wrote that after she went to college. It's kind of a tough time, not just for the parents, but I could see it in her eyes. She was a very confident child and teenager, and I wasn't worried about her going off. I knew she'd be fine, but you could still see ... like it said [in the song] 'you're grown, but you're not.' I could see in her eyes that she was anxious to go and looking forward to it, but a little bit scared and tentative. I guess all those images came out of watching that."