Alice’s experiences in Wonderland can be taken as a kind of exaggerated metaphor for the experience of growing up, both in terms of physically growing up and coming to understand the world of adults and how that world differs from a child's expectation of it.
Alice’s anxiety about growing up and about the wide world beyond her familiar comforts can be seen in her constant evaluation of her own size and worth. She physically grows and shrinks again and again in the story, at times not even able to see her whole shape. Her preoccupation with growing and shrinking, and finding the right size for what she needs to do, evokes how disorienting the idea of growing up can be. The physical changes can be both frightening and exhilarating.