Growing Pains was ranked number 29 on Rolling Stone's list of the Top 50 Albums of 2007 and was eventually certified Platinum by RIAA.
[3] In an interview for Blues & Soul, Blige explained the significance of the album's title, stating: I started writing the record right after that whole gigantic day I had at the Grammies last year.
[16] Allmusic editor Marisa Brown gave it four out of five stars and called it "a mature, polished, and utterly professional set of well-crafted songs", noting that "the album takes an even greater step toward pop".
[6] Alex Macpherson of The Guardian complimented its themes of Blige's "past and present", while citing the track "Roses" as "one of the best songs of her career".
[12] USA Today's Edna Gundersen wrote that "Her vulnerability and vocal prowess are undeniable, and resistance melts away as her voice [...] commands and communicates with startling clarity".
Club commended Blige for "reaching beyond the relative stability of her personal life and playing up the vulnerable everywoman persona that's long resonated with her female fanbase".
[9] Slant Magazine's Eric Henderson called the album an "overstuffed collection of affirmations, self-definitions, and keepin'-it-real-isms" and wrote that "what's both most compelling and most limiting about Blige's Growing Pains: She keeps her most salable characteristic, her emotiveness, under duress, which provides tension but no release".
[14] Alfred Soto of The Village Voice noted "no more drama, but plenty of (occasionally excellent) melodrama", adding that "as her acting chops diminish, her command over plush, slightly jagged Contempo r&b improves".
[18] Writing for Rolling Stone, critic Robert Christgau commented that "the tone of her confessions has changed with her music", stating "Growing Pains is an edgier record than The Breakthrough, but Blige has definitely lost or just outgrown the brassy urgency of her twenties".
[13] In his consumer guide for MSN Music, Christgau described the album as "an expensive, honorable, credible sampler of the hottest current R&B brands", and gave it an A− rating.