Harmful Influences on Children, and Why Children are Growing Up Too Fast

In a Boston school, second-graders take a field trip to the local police station to hear a presentation about the dangers of illegal drugs and to be fingerprinted for “stolen child” identification cards.

In an affluent Chicago suburb, elementary school students carry cell phones, pagers, palm pilots and PDAs (personal digital assistants) to keep track of their hectic schedules. Says one parent: “Our kids are just trying to keep their lives ordered.”

In London, a 12-year-old boy spends a couple of hours roaming around the city with a few of his friends after school. When he comes home, he proudly displays a small silver stud inserted into his newly pierced tongue.

Admittedly these may seem like relatively minor upsets in a world scarred by school violence, teen pregnancy, adolescent suicide and widespread substance abuse. Nevertheless, such small examples illustrate the depth and scope of a serious problem in Western society: children and teens are growing up too fast, and the innocence of childhood is becoming a thing of the past.

One person who has been very outspoken about this trend is David Elkind, professor of child study, Senior Resident Scholar at Tufts University, and author of The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast, Too Soon (1988). “Our society is compressing childhood more and more to where children are not children for very long,” he says. “Children are under tremendous pressure to ‘be mature’ and to ‘grow up’ when they have not had the chance to develop emotional maturity.” This is a trend not only in the United States but throughout the industrialized world, including Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and Britain.

“It’s a difficult time for parents,” Elkind says, “because there are so many pressures fro...

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...the time and not understand about being still and just enjoying a quiet moment or sitting outside and watching a bird in a tree,” Chastain says. “If children are just success-oriented and the whole focus is to get into a good college and get a great job, then, when they become adults, all they know is work and earning a better income. And that’s all that’s going to be important to them.”

So what’s a parent to do? As a parent, you can help your child grow up at his or her own pace. The key is not to put it on the back burner to be dealt with sometime in the future. If you wait until it is more convenient to start altering the course of your child’s life, it may be too late or it may never happen. If changes need to be made in your family’s or your child’s lifestyle, start implementing these changes today. It’s critical that you do—for your sake and your child’s.