By pushing children to grow up too fast, it affects children’s emotional, social, and moral development as well as impact their attitudes, values and behavior. When a young child is empowered with adult rights, freedoms, and products that he or she cannot yet handle responsibly, then he or she is set up for failure. Children are exposed to serious or sexualized issues that they can’t fully comprehend let alone handle. Kids begin to adopt the belief that they they should be acting and dressing like teens when they are still in grade-school.
On one hand, parents are pushing their young children to grow up, but on the other, parents keep them from really growing up at all when the time really comes during their teen years, rocketing in to solve all their problems well into young adulthood. Adolescent is the time when parents realize their kids are growing up to fast so they try to hold them back. They treat them like children, not even realizing the time for that has come and gone.
According to Elkind’s The Hurried Child (2001), the pressures of hurrying children into adult-like behavior usually manifests in negative consequences in adolescence. During the stage of adolescence, children who are told by society to grow up fast may feel betrayed because they are expected to remain children in times of their adolescence. They will grow internal emotions that they will most likely not understand and will need help expressing. In their adolescence they will also feel neglected and unparented becoming depressed because they missed something they can’t regain and they will be more likely to turn to the thing they believe they deserve because they’re “all grown up” – sex, drugs and alcohol. Alcohol and drug abuse by adolescents, teenage pregnancy, in-school crime and suicide are following a sharply upward curve. Three in ten american teens experience pregnancy and the rate of teenage childbearing in the U.S. is hest among the most developed countries (Planned Parenthood). Alcohol is the number one abused substance by teenagers in the United States (Center for Disease Control and Prevention). In 2009, 10 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 were current illicit drug users (National Center for Children in Poverty). In a 2003 survey of high school students, 17.1% had carried a weapon to school (National Center for Children Exposed to Violence), and 7.4% threatened or injured someone with a weapon on school property one or more times (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among those 5- to 14-year-olds and third leading cause of death among those 15- to 24-year-olds (American Association for Suicide Prevention).
Alcohol and drug abuse by adolescents are
following a sharply upward curve. Source: flickr