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CHILDREN-COME-ADULTS: TO BE, OR NOT TO BE?
ASMA AHMED HASHMI
PROFESSOR TEDDY CHOCOS
SEMINAR 126G
DATED: 06/26/2013
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Children are like soft clay mud. One can bend them, break them or can shape them. The
emotional, psychological, mental and the familial bonding they develop in their childhood carve
the shape of the soft clay into permanent and fixed shades of personality in adulthood. Those
shades of personality are decided by parenting, upbringing, societal and sometimes peerpressures. Adults are given the best sketch of the creation-children, and also given the prime
responsibility to colour in them the most polished colours. Painting those delicate and vulnerable
sketches is not a work to be done at leisure time. It requires care, devotion, love and diligence. It
takes considerable time before one can finally get to see the fruits of their efforts and get their
hands to the final masterpiece-that is, when their child becomes a successful adult.
To grow into successful adults is an important subset of growing into carefully manicured
and well-groomed childhood. Childhood is learning; adulthood is the practical implementation of
that learning. What one learns now as a child is what one would do later as an adult. It is the
karma of leaning and giving back. Today what is learnt as a child from the society is what could
be given back to the society tomorrow as an adult. It is either good or bad. It is give and take. It
can be either a success or a failure. But while so much stress is on the output of the future stateadulthood, that children begin to lose the bliss of their present state-childhood. The growing
expectations associated with children into pushing them to adulthood start to crumble a child’s
expectations with his childhood. One wants to protect and preserve the aura of successful adults
by endangering the childish intricacies of a child in his childhood. Is that even a possibility? It is
a possibility that might ruin the possibilities of an innocent childhood and thus also a successful
adulthood.
David Elkind, a renowned child psychologist expressed his deep concerns about the attempt
to achieve successful adulthood via the extinction of childhood. He was troubled by the harm
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that is being done to children and also to the society when adults try to pamper maturity into their
children’s upbringing. He outlined these concerns in his research essay ‘Childhood’s End’, “As a
society we have come to imagine that it is good for young people to mature rapidly. Yet we do
our children harm when we hurry them through childhood.” Maturity comes with time. It is
wholly wrong to try to nail maturity in children when they are so young as to pronounce, spell, or
to understand what it means properly. One can begin to expect things from their children while
they are still in the process to understand to figure out those expectations.
Maturity, responsibility, stability, morality are the key ingredients that help an adult to
keep moving in the circle of a successful adult. These key ingredients are cultivated in a child
from an early age. Grace J. Craig also a psychologist made an intensive research when he was
analyzing the works of another psychologist, Roger Gould in his essay ‘Early Adulthood: Roles
and Issues’, “Decisions must be made. Problems must be solved. The very ability to respond to
change and to adapt successfully to new conditions is a hallmark of maturity.” Maturity that
comes with time; it is woven into a child’s personality gradually; it grows with the child and
within a child with time. When maturity is tried to be forcefully rushed in a child then the society
is shaped with immature decisions made by the rushed upon mature children. The child learns to
grow, to progress and to make the slow transition to adulthood. But these should be slow
transitions were pushed into becoming ever so fast. These fast transitions to adulthood in future
prove to be more furious. In adulthood children make these important contours of maturity,
responsibility, stability and maturity more defined, more polished. These are something that is
cultivated to be made into a fertile land in childhood, and it finally reaps all the fruits in
adulthood.
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Maturity, morality and stability are the signatures of a true successful adult. A child’s nature
always revolves around to be edging towards instability. Childhood is a unique phase of an
individual’s life that is cooked in a pressure-cooker to make a speedy transition to adulthood. A
child who is forced by societal and sometimes parental pressures to think, act, dress, smell and
even taste like an adult. Clothing no longer segregates children and adults. On the contrary it
now integrates and makes them stand together, at least in the face off. As Elkind explains it in his
essay ‘The Childhood’s End’, “For both sexes, clothing set children apart. It signaled adults that
these children were to be treated differently, perhaps indulgently; it made it easier for children to
act as children.” The core problem was not that children are beginning to wear suits and pants as
for guys, or wearing skirts or makeup as do girls. Dressing becomes a problem when children’s
way of dressing starts to mirror in their behaviors. It can be good or bad, but when the bad turns
to worse then there is a serious calling. A girl might wear bright makeup, sheer red lipstick,
really short skirts, in short can subconsciously become a mirror image of a prostitute. What is
worse that without she starts to act like one and with knowing, she is treated like one. She won’t
be treated differently as a child. She would be treated as a prostitute like any adult prostitutes.
Children are capable of dressing like children and even like adults but they don’t have the
maturity to decide to dress like a gentleman or lady while still a child. Maturity, that comes with
age.
Though children, however unsuccessfully, might learn to dress like an adult but their
emotional development cannot be disciplined like an adult. One can’t train the emotional feelings
of a child to feel like an adult. Elkind in “Childhood’s End” gave a detailed outline about the
felony adults are committing on their part to pressurize children to grow into adults soon. Elkind
gave different case scenarios in his essay ‘The Childhoods End’, where the child is forced and
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expected to act and be like an adult, connected with it the negative impacts it have on the whole
society. One such scenario is when a child is trained and encouraged to dress like an adult. This
wild, untamed sense of adulthood has to be even portrayed in a child’s way of dressing. It was
surprising to see that young children were given a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, a bright top from
Gloria Vanderbilt, and Christian Dior undies from their grandma as presents. Making a child to
dress and copy demeanor of adults does not influence the child inside a child. Their emotional
and intellectual developments still see the workings of a young child. So what if they were given
a pair of Calvin Klein jeans as present, they would still hang out and play with a group of young
children in their back yard. The emotional wardrobe of children has no tinge of adulthood.
While all this children sense of dressing and acting like adults might seem fanciful to parents
and also to the society, they seem to overlook the repercussions of their actions that would affect
their children. Children are torn between the dilemmas of two selves-child and a forced adult.
Their actions do not act correspondingly with their wants and emotional needs. Elkind reflected
upon this dilemma of two selves, “Children can grow fast in some ways but not in others.
Growing up emotionally is complicated and difficult under any circumstances but may be
especially so when the child’s behavior and appearance speak ‘adult’ while their feelings cry
child.” While children may learn to grow into fast processed adults in the manner of their
dressing, gait and appearance, they are still very much childlike in their emotional stratum. They
might act like an adult but still have the innate emotional needs of a child. Those emotional
needs if not fulfilled create a vacuum in the child’s world. The instability that this confusion of
roles creates becomes more stable. They are drawn by the tantalizing picturesque depiction of the
adult world by the media. The liberty of the adult world magnetizes them. They want sexual,
social, behavioral and societal liberation of the adult world. They believe that since their parents
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expect them to act and behave like adults then it is outright hypocrisy to deny them the perks of
being an adult. Their parents want them to be adults. Wrong. Because children then begin to ask
for all the liberation that comes with acting mature and with no strings attached. Elkind gave his
deep reflections on the blunder of experimenting to grow up fast in his essay ‘Childhoods End’
by employing the insights of Patricia O’Brien’s article ‘The Shrinking of the childhood’, “Martin
L (not his real name)confronted his teenager who had stayed out very late the night before. The
son replied, “Look, Dad I’ve done it all-drugs, sex and booze, there is nothing left I don’t know
about.” This young man is twelve years old!”
When children are constantly slammed into a world (the adult world) that is not yet their own
(children world) then they become the victim of a confusion that starts to cloud their lives. They
are not expected to be what they are, and where their roles fit. They are pushed to become
‘miniature adults’, as Elkind says. They can’t be what they want and the roles that the society has
carved for them cannot be fulfilled without certain dire consequences. The consequences that not
only ruin a child’s childhood but also disable him and his chances of becoming a successful
adult. Children are still childlike when they imitate their parents to fit in the sample of childrencum-adult. They are expected to be adults so they exhibit maturity by indulging in sex, booze
and drugs. Because this is what they see and to children, seeing is believing. They cannot see
maturity, neither morality nor stability to associate with adults. To them maturity means
engaging in sex, morality is booze, and stability is drugs. And they deemed it wrong to be
confronted by their parents for their actions, much as it is wrong on their part to confront their
parents. A child can learn to dress like an adult, talk like one and even act like one, but they
cannot be expected to learn the maturity to decide between right and wrong; good or bad. It is
wrong to expect otherwise and it is far more wrong to put children up for such expectations. This
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learning is learnt with time when wisdom of aging strikes upon them. Children would learn to act
like adults, when time and maturing dawn on them. Forced to behave like an adult while still a
child does not only harm children but the whole society becomes dysfunctional as a result,
because there is no speedy growth to emotional and intellectual maturity.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Craig, Grace J. “Early Adulthood: Roles and Issues”;
Elkind, David “Childhood’s End”