Has Childhood Changed

Has Childhood Changed?

The purpose of this assignment is to examine if childhood has changed in the past 40 to 50 years. For the assignment I interviewed a 9 year old African American female and a 54 year old African American female. During my interview I found out that childhood has changed tremendously. Morals and values have been subsided due to priorities. Then on the contrary stress has taken a dramatic rise due to more children being raised in a single-parent home. In this paper I covered these basic areas: family history, school, friends, and extra-curricular activities.

When I asked the 9 year old (Trinity) to tell me about her family she started out with “I have a dad, a mom, and a grandmother.” Then I asked her did she live with all those people? Trinity said, “well, no I live with my mom and grandmother, but my daddy comes to see me every week and sometimes at school during the week.” We kept the conversation going in that direction and I asked her to tell me about her school. Trinity loved school even though she was teased a lot because she did not have a “complete” family. Her school was a big school in the city where diversity was no issue. Even the classes were well distributed with students of all kinds. Trinity however, had a small group of friends that she liked. She did not really try to fit in with a lot of the other kids because she said everyone teased her. She worried sometimes about the things people said about her and her father (Joshua). Especially considering that she absolutely loved her father. Once she even hit a girl at school and that just happened to be a day that her father came to eat lunch with her. She said she told him that the girl was picking on her. She said her daddy told her to tell someone what was going on next time and not try to handle it by herself. “Good girls don’t fight, T (that’s what her father called her for short)” was what she remembered him say. Then she started to drift back into her family a bit.

She said she always enjoyed her time with her father. She especially enjoyed when he came over to their house and played games with her and helped her with her homework. Joshua spent a lot of time with Trinity. To my surprise Trinity did not talk a lot about her mother. Seeing in which that was the parent that she lived with and shared the same sex with, I thought she would talk about her more. T...

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...ever they went. After hearing her story I feel that I have truly a lot to be thankful for.

I would most certainly say that childhood has changed to the extreme opposite. For these two young ladies growing up in a very similar environment, life was totally different. Trinity would never have to drop out of school to help her mother raise her. Even the issue with her father, he stayed around to be a part of her life, unlike Linda’s father, he was never talked about. Trinity has transportation to take her wherever she wants to go. She does however; have to lock her doors when she is not at home as well as when she is at home. Trust is not as strong in communities as it used to be. Trinity’s main stage for worry was fitting in with the kids at school. Also, she had to deal with the teasing about her parents not being together. So I would say that priorities have been reversed from the time that my mother was growing up. Parents now are the only ones worrying about things that need to be done. I agree that children should not be stressed about at home issues but they still should be concerned with doing well in school so mommy and daddy don’t have to struggle to take care of them.