Early Maturity... or Not?
Sunday, June 24, 2007
10 Is the New 15 As Kids Grow Up Faster (
link)
Children between the ages of 8-12 have been found to have acquired interests in things that a teenager would normally be interested in, such as pop music and teenage slang. This has gotten parents and professionals worried about this trend. After all, they probably have a set of conservative values regarding young children that they acquired from their generation – that all pre-teens should be pure and innocent. That young children are behaving like sex-charged teenagers these days reflects negatively on the morality of today’s society, and foreshadows a trend which may lead to further moral degradation of the society of tomorrow.
It cannot be denied that there are differences between the society of yesterday and that of today – and I attribute this to technology. The people of yesterday were largely conservative, especially when young, as their only exposure to the society was through their parents, their benign schoolteachers, and their equally innocent peers. At most, they had the radio or the television as their link with the “outside world”, but these forms of media were mostly self-censored, in order to appeal to the family. As such, young children did not have much opportunity to be “corrupted”. Now, with many more mediums of technology, young children (fed constantly with technological gadgets by their apathetic parents) are now exposed to a whole world of information – not all of which are meant for the eyes of children. The children can now access teenage and even adult websites – and needless to say, they will be corrupted much more easily than in the past, when you also take into account the fact that adults themselves have become much more liberal when it comes to values.
These children cannot bear all of the blame, though. With Internet now a given in most houses, children, inquisitive by nature, will tend to want to explore the Net – and stumble upon undesirable information. Also, it is only human nature to want to appear impressive in front of one’s peers – and from my experience, children would want to be cool by appearing older than they really are.
The parents should definitely not bear the blame for being too “old-school and inflexible” in their thinking. For someone who has grown up in a conservative and morally upright society, the sight of young children behaving like immoral adults would be too large a paradigm shift for them. After all, which parent could bear to see their little children behaving immorally?
If this trend carries on, it will doubtlessly have negative consequences on the society. I believe that the character of a person is shaped in his childhood, and obviously, someone who has been exposed to the wrong set of moral values will grow up with them – he may grow up to be a sex maniac, or a pornography addict, or someone who spends his time lazing about, listening to mind-numbing hip-hop or punk rock songs. As a teen myself, I can attest to the fact that doing typically teenage activities, such as listening to pop music, has a negative effect on me. After all, it is not hard to find pop songs with vulgarities and sex references in them, and one could say that these songs corrupted me slightly – an inevitable outcome from listening to such, one may say, trashy songs.
give me a good grade pleeeease! 3:06 AM