Kids are kids, or at least they should be. When I was young, children (I mean those under the age of 13) were children: totally innocent, with no cares or worries (except for getting back in time for tea and doing what my parents told me to do), no idea what what I wanted to do or what the world was like, happily playing cops and robbers or making rose perfume with my friends and my dad’s roses. However, it seems, in my experiences over the last 10 years, that the age of innocence has passed.
Children today tend to be worldly wise and old before their time. They want mobile phones and social media accounts at the age of 7, they (our daughters – 7 and 4) want to wear makeup and high heels. It seems to me that children want to grow up. They do not want or enjoy being children and are too impatient to wait until they are teenagers. Somehow at the age of 7 or 8 (this also happened with my ex’s son) they stop wanting to be kids and magically want to become 16! I always try to tell our 3 children: “Enjoy it while you can, it’s the best days of your life” – at the risk of sounding like my mother, but God was right! Even explaining that instead of going to school they will go to work which isn’t half as fun, incoming bills, hardships etc. but still want to grow.
What are we doing so that our children do not like or get bored of being children? Well, the SATs start in schools around age 7 or 8; the exams for kids that age are ridiculous. We all know that exams are not fun and that they put a lot of pressure on people. Schools have performance tables to excel and therefore teachers put a lot of pressure on our children.
We’re not strict parents, so it can’t be that. Perhaps the more relaxed modern parenting techniques mean that children see more and therefore understand more about adult life and find it an exciting idea, so much so that they want to be adults. However, I have noticed that more girls than boys are like this: we are told that men are always behind women in terms of maturity and therefore that could be the reason for the difference. (Our 4-year-old is the way she is, because she idolizes her sister and wants to be like her.)
So what else contributes to the development of our children, especially when it comes to girls? Is society making our children want to grow up TOO FAST? Maybe – I’ve noticed that ads on children’s television show 7 or 8 year olds doing things we wouldn’t have done until we were 12 or 13. There are scooters aimed at this age range (7-8 years) with makeup trays on them. Media also has aside to play. Things aimed at boys are generally less mature than those aimed at girls of the same age; for example, movies; High School Musical, Camp Rock, Hannah Montana, all apparently aimed at teenagers. However, due to this problem, these films fall short of their goal, being apparently too young for the modern teenager. Thus, they appeal to younger kids (especially girls) in the 7-8 age range, and these movies cover relationships and issues related to high school life. Movies are exciting and fun and therefore make being older more attractive. Also, our children try to imitate what they see on the screen, such as dancing and singing, attitudes and even accents.
With our 7 year old, she has already started coming home from school and telling us who her boyfriends are and who she has been kissing at school; It’s nice that she’s open about it and she’s comfortable discussing it, but for my wife and I it’s scary. My wife has had conversations about things with her about 4 years before I would expect to have these conversations. She has asked for a bra several times (!) and she is 7 years old and very skinny. The other thing I’ve noticed, and I know all girls want to be like their mother, is that she has a matriarchal streak that has developed, and you can often hear her trying to be the adult with our other two children, talking in very adult tones, and saying the kind of things you’ve heard my wife and me say.
It’s scary to think that the age of innocence for our children is fading, and it’s a shame. I remember childhood days, playing innocent games without a care in the world. Our children are growing so fast these days that we need to exercise conscious parenting to try to slow it down. If boys stay at their current development rate, and girls’ development rate continues to increase, we will have age-gap relationships for boys, rather than there being a 2-year gap between most couples ( as always happened in the 60s). , 70’s and 80’s) there will be a 4-5 year gap (maybe longer) between most couples in 2020 when our children mature and start to settle down. That’s a doubling/tripping of girls’ maturity development in just 50 years; if that continues, by 2070 we’ll see our 16-year-old daughter’s first boyfriend be between 26 and 30 as the norm.
These are not statistics, just my reflections, but a truly scary thought nonetheless. So please be a conscientious parent and try to prevent our children from growing up too fast – keep toys and media exposure as close to innocence as possible and that way maybe we can retard the rapid development of childhood. maturity of our son and prevent my predictions from coming true, thus saving the innocence of childhood.