Chandler Noyes

Mrs. Thomas
UWRT 1104
09 November 2016
Are Children Growing Up Too Fast?
Im always the youngest. In any setting I am in, you will find me surrounded by those
way beyond my years. Its both a curse and a blessing. Because of that, I am an old soul. But
because of that, I also constantly miss out on things. I grew up being the baby of the family, and
having two big brothers. They would talk about things my innocent ears wouldnt understand by
using intelligent words and suggestive winks. If I would inquire as to what they were talking
about, I usually got the same answer. Chandler, honey, youre too young to understand. Well
tell you when youre older. But I was a smart child, and over time I would start piecing together
what things meant. Between my brothers conversations with their friends and whatever was on
the news, I felt like I grew up before it was my time.
In 2016, this is a common phenomenon. Children are growing up at a very alarming rate.
A teacher could say that their oral exam is due in a week, and those kids will hear nothing more
than the word oral and will laugh. In this day in age though, we now have to worry if they have
first hand experience with that. The Washington Posts writes in one of their articles, To make
matters worse, medical experts say parents need to start thinking about cholesterol levels and
sexually-transmitted diseases when we talk about the health of our 10-year-olds. In growing up
too fast, children start to experience things they shouldnt until late teens or early twenties. Part
of this is due to the marketing skills of children toys and other items.
Francis Palumbo is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Georgetown Pediatrics
Hospital. He even took part in the attempt by the Federal Trade Commission to ban TV
advertisement that was aimed at adolescents. He writes many articles talking about the dangers
of growing up too fast, and many specialize on marketing schemes appealing to little girls.

Anything that can be sold successfully will be marketed with little consideration for potential
developmental harm, he says of capitalistic marketing. He also touches on cosmetic makeup for
young girls, and how its advertising is the same as that of a Cosmopolitan magazine. When
selling something to an eight year old girl, you should not use the phrases, luscious lips,
mysterious eyes, or ready to go out on the town, but unfortunately thats reality. Im not
saying kids makeup will be the reason our society will fail, but if this behavior continues, it
could have a severe effect on todays children, who will soon be societys future. He closes his
article with a somber, Dolls now have breasts and boyfriends; infants wear makeup; and
newspapers carry stories of 9-year-old bank robbers, eye-opening statistics on teenaged
pregnancy, and alcoholism in the little league. If you compare how I dressed in middle school
versus how middle schoolers dress now, you will find a shocking difference. I dressed myself in
Justice clothing while these girls are wearing smaller versions of what I wear now as a college
student.
I remember the first time I wore makeup. It was the sixth grade open house before school
started that year, and I had snuck into my mothers makeup drawer and did an appalling version
of what she did every morning to her face, onto my face. I arrived to school and all my friends
gave me compliments. I felt magnificent, but only because I was doing a thing high school girls
do. And my friends only commended me because they thought the same thing I did. Im
wearing makeup, so of course Im prettier and older and cooler. Let me tell you, if eighteenyear-old me saw eleven-year-old me, shed cringe in embarrassment. My mother is at least four
shades darker than me, and Im pretty sure I might have used sharpie as eyeliner. At my middle
school there was a certain day every week called Slap Ass Friday where the boys would go
around and slap several girls butts. The worst part of this? The girls prided themselves on how
many times a boy would hit them. As if it were a privilege for the girls to be treated like a

punching bag. We have been treated like adults since we turned double digits, so was it really a
surprise that this was normal behavior?
On a daily basis, you can hear just about anyone complain about how stressed out they
are. Stress seems like a common emotion to deal with, but the side effects from it can be fatal.
When kids grow up too fast, it can have devastating effects. Dr. Gail Gross says, If children are
offered the stresses of adulthood, they will also exhibit the ailments of adulthood. Consequently,
psychiatric units are filled today with a new breed of troubled youngster. Pediatricians are
finding more children with stress related diseases, such as ulcers, by the age of 7, as well as sleep
disorders and bedwetting. Suicide and depression are no longer restricted to adults, but have
found their way into the childs community. Dr. Gross is a family, child development, and
human behavior expert, and definitely knows what shes talking about. Its one thing to say,
these kids nowadays are stressed, but to see the consequences they face by having so much
pressure placed on them is heartbreaking. Even WebMD says, On a scale of 1 to 10, the
millennial generation stands at 5.4 stress-wise, significantly higher than the national average of
4.9, the association found after surveying more than 2,000 Americans.
Its no wonder why this generation, and the upcoming one as well, is constantly in a state
of stress. Teenagers stop living day to day and instead live test to test. Parents want whats best
for their kid, but sometimes they push too far and too hard. In the aforementioned article by The
Washington Post, it sums it up by saying, Parents are pushing their kids toward adulthood at
ever younger and increasingly crazy ways. They send 7-year-olds to technique-intense sports
camps, hire academic tutors for their kindergartners, sign 4-year-olds up for violin lessons and
contract with writing coaches to help compose their kids preschool applications. So when this
pressure is applied to young children, not only is their emotional balance thrown off, but their
physical one is too. Its become average to see eight year old boys go through puberty, and girls

developing at a very young age. Some scientists want to blame hormones in food, but I, and
many others, believe its because that society demands children to grow up faster than nature
intended. Unfortunately, because of this, the biology of children are starting to differ
greatly from fifty years ago. Neuroscientists now know that brain maturation continues far later
into development than had been believed previously. Significant changes in brain anatomy and
activity are still taking place during young adulthood, especially in prefrontal regions that are
important for planning ahead, anticipating the future consequences of ones decisions,
controlling impulses, and comparing risk and reward. says Laurence Steinberg, a psychology
professor at Temple University. Typically, men and women should reach their full maturity midtwenties. This makes us speculate as to where we should draw the line between adolescents and
adults.
Think about the daily pressure that is placed on adults. These include the necessity of a
job, getting a higher education, finding a spouse, and more. Now take this stress, and apply it to
teenagers. Despite how it sounds, this is not an outrageous idea. I know because I dealt with
these burdens at a young age. I was told it was necessary to have a job in high school, so I got
one at the ripe age of fourteen. On top of that, there was the pressure to start dating, so I was
constantly concerned with how I looked, which of course led to many insecurities. But none of
that mattered if I didnt do well on a test. Because even one test seemed to decide if I would get
into Advanced Placement classes, just so I could worry about more challenging tests. The tests
were only a prerequisite to college though, which was the the be all to end all kind of thing.
The saddest thing about all of this was that I was only one in a sea of students suffocating under
all this pressure.
In an amazing TED Talk, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore challenges the idea of what age the
brain grows the most. Ms. Blakemore is a cognitive neuroscience and studies the social

brain. After spending years of doing specialized work on the adolescent brain, she could tell you
the differences between an adult and a child brain in her sleep. Instead of focusing on the
pressure places on young minds, she instead discusses how the brain will interpret the stress.
Sarah-Jayne says, Medial Cortex decreases during the time of adolescence because adults and
adolescents use different mental approaches to diffuse social situations. Shes essentially saying
adults have completely different brains than adolescents, and so they handle every situation
differently. Of course, this is a fancy way of saying that teenagers are more prone to make
reckless decisions. And no, that is not me speaking from personal experience. Sarah-Jayne goes
on to explain that teenagers cant think of consequences being long-term, so they tend not to
think through every action. Making the (wrong) decision of putting off a paper you have to write
is not the worst decision a teenager could make. Think of all the questions they get asked a day,
and adults tend to want an answer immediately. That doesnt tend to go over well in the future.
Todays mistakes should not be tomorrows problems.
Parents always say that their kids should be able to talk to them about anything, and that
nothing is more important than their children. Regrettably, this is not always the case.
Parents should always be their kids biggest fan, and this can get taken too far when parents push
and push their kid too far. Dr. David Elkind is a professor in child development, and believes that
hurrying a child to grow up can be detrimental to their health. He also believes that parents, and
even teachers, are blind to the consequences. He goes on to say, The irony is that no one
believes in hurrying children. No parent, educator, or legislator I ever spoke to believes in
pressuring children to do things well beyond what they are capable of doing. Of course, no
parent purposefully ignores their childrens needs or even wants their kid to be unhappy. When a
parent forces their kids into sports or advanced classes, they think they are doing whats best.

Hurrying children is a problem that has always been with us, Dr. Elkind says, It was
recognized and commented on by our most gifted educational theorists.
Doctors obviously know the ins and outs of a childs biology and the inner workings of
the brain, but who better to ask about societys constant pressure to be perfect than college
students? With this in mind, I asked my roommates if they felt pressured to grow up too fast, and
if they had any examples. Briannes dad had a lot of issues when she was growing up, and
therefor was not around much to help raise her. Because of this, Brianne essentially filled his
role, and helped raise her two younger brothers. When youre younger, you dream about being a
princess, not being your brothers parent. Brianne told me. Of course she loves her two siblings,
but she never got to live the childhood she wanted, or deserved. My other roommate and her
boyfriend, Kristyn and Maxwell, both came from privileged, white homes. They didnt have hard
lives, per se, but Kristyn tells a story of how she had a thirteen year old girl in her middle school
get pregnant. I felt bad for her, because everyone knew the boyfriend pressured her into having
sex. Her mom had gotten pregnant with her at sixteen, so I guess it starts to become a pattern.
Sadly, teenage pregnancy has become something we dont even blink at anymore. If a girl gets
pregnant, shes basically shunned from society. On the flipside, however, if youre a teen who is
not having sex, you get funny looks. The CDC says, The U.S. teen pregnancy rate is
substantially higher than in other western industrialized nations, and racial/ethnic and geographic
disparities in teen birth rates persist. Maxwell concurred with Kristyn, as all smart boyfriends
should, saying, Pregnancy was a common phenomenon to happen back where I lived. Maxwell
grew up with a dermatologist for a father and accountant for a mother. While he might not have
faced the same hardships as Brianne did, he still was not safe from other burdens. His parents
pressured Maxwell all throughout his educational career, steering him in the direction they

wanted. I remember getting emails in high school from clubs I didnt remember joining, only to
find out my parents had signed up for me.
I can see how its become necessary for kids to be prepared at a young age. I want to say
there is nothing wrong with getting young adults ready for being independent, but the methods
we have came up with to prepare kids are cruel. Advanced classes arent necessarily a bad thing,
but most kids dont stop at one class. They fill their schedule up with many hard electives, just to
be piled down with homework and tests. In college, I have found that a lot of professors have the
Study or Dont, I Get Paid Either Way Mentality.
Most girls shouldnt be worrying about their weight and looks until teenage years, but I
remember stepping on the scale at 8, and trying to find several different ways to lose some extra
pounds. I was not alone in this either. Elementary school should be the time to think about recess
and your favorite color crayon, but girls started to become obsessed with the number on the scale
rather than learning how to multiply numbers. The New York Times says, Different brain
regions and systems mature along different timetables. There is no single age at which the
adolescent brain becomes an adult brain. So who is to say when a child can start to bear the
responsibility of an adult?
Throughout my study, I have found that there is no set age. A child doesnt turn eighteen,
and then magically become an adult. Instead, they are given several different responsibilities as
they age. If I could, I would go on to interview students at a middle school about how stressed
out they are, and then compare it to what high schoolers say. I would ask them what could we do
to fix this problem, and if we did fix this problem, would they be prepared enough for the real
world? I think in order to fix this problem, we need to treat kids for the age they are now, and not
treat them the age they will be in the future. Tough Love is not piling your child or student
down with hours of work and giving them sleepless nights. This is not love, this is an epidemic.

WORKS CITED

Dvorak, Petula. "Are Kids Growing Up Too Fast?" The Washington Post. N.p., 14 Nov. 2011.
Web. 8 Nov. 2016.

Elkind, David. The Hurried Child: Growing up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley Pub., 1981. Print.

Palumbo, Francis. "Growing Up Too Fast." Pediatrics.aappublications.org. N.p., Jan. 1982.

Web. 03 Nov. 2016.

Rimm, Sylvia B. Growing up Too Fast: The Rimm Report on the Secret World of America's
Middle Schoolers. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2005. Print.

Steinberg, Laurence, Dr. "Adulthood: What the Brain Says About Maturity." The New York
Times. N.p., 29 May 2012. Web. 04 Nov. 2016.

The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain. Perf. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Ted.com. N.p.,

June 2012. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.