Growing Up Too Fast : Experts Warn That Children Are Being Pushed to Act Like Adults Long Before They Are Ready

Leaving a kindergarten admission interview at a San Francisco private school, a 5-year-old boy is overheard talking to his mother. “That’s a rough school,” he says earnestly. “They asked a lot of hard questions about numbers and letters, but I knew the answers.”

At a Los Angeles elementary school, a first-grader pulls the top of her dress down, as though she is exposing her bosom, and makes sexual advances toward a little boy.

The scene shifts to New Carrolltown, Md., where 18-year-old Robert Jenkins keeps a schedule that would make a time manager proud. Working 18 hours per week in a county library, Jenkins participates in soccer, track, the marching band and two honor societies, all the while handling chores at home and sometimes caring for two younger sisters and a brother.

Whatever happened to trips to Disneyland, you ask? For many, the more troubling question is: Whatever happened to childhood?

“I’ll tell you,” said Melba Knutsen, a Los Angeles elementary school teacher for 28 years. “Children are skipping it.”

Miniature Adults

In fact, the portrait of today’s child--dressed from birth to look like a miniature adult, pressured to read before kindergarten and left unsupervised after school--is causing alarm among some psychologists who suggest the push to make children grow up quickly is symptomatic of an underlying societal disregard for their well-being.

Furthermore, child-development experts suggest the hurried child sometimes develops into the harried teen, expected not only to achieve at school but to shop, cook and care for the family as well.

“There are times in history when children fare better than others,” said David Elkind, professor of child study at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “But there’s no question about it: Children are not well cared for in our society.”

Elkind and others argue that the lot of children, rather than improving, is declining. Citing factors such as the ever-growing numbers of children living in poverty, increases in infant mortality, childhood obesity, delinquency and teen-age pregnancy, and deteriorating public education, they contend that children today are getting the short end of the stick.

There was a time when youngsters rushed home from school to Mom, wolfed down milk and cookies, then raced outside for what seemed like endless devotion to throwing balls, skating, riding bicycles and playing hopscotch. It was unstructured play, the kind psychologists believe fosters intelligence and creativity. And in retrospect, the middle decades of the 20th Century appear to have been the golden age of childhood.

In contrast, today’s young children are bombarded with violence and adult experiences on television and in movies, making them sexually precocious, experts say. Given the high divorce rate, they add, children often have a front-row seat while watching one or both parents date.

The sense that children aren’t doing as well as prior generations comes from many quarters. A recent USC study, “Values and Everyday Life,” documents how California’s children are living today. John Orr, Tansey professor of social ethics, who co-authored the report with Don Miller, professor of religion, were sobered by some of the findings.

“We estimate that only one-quarter to one-third of all kids seem to be growing up very well, going to college and taking the track that would make for healthy integration into American life. This is a shocking realization. An extraordinarily large number of children are at risk,” Orr said.

In the late 1970s, Elkind noticed a trend to push children to take on the physical, psychological and social trappings of adulthood before they are ready. His book, “The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon,” published in 1981, warned that many young people experiencing school failure, delinquency and drugs and suicide were, in fact, hurried children reacting to stress.

Since then, many of the young children Elkind wrote about have become teenagers, and matters have gotten worse, he said in a telephone interview. “The things I wrote about have not disappeared but have become entrenched.”

Moreover, as Elkind wrote in a sequel, “All Grown Up & No Place To Go: Teenagers in Crisis”: “Many parents, schools and much of the media have been hurrying children to grow up fast, but they also have been abandoning teen-agers.”

The result, he thinks, is “a staggering number of teen-agers who have not had the adult guidance, direction and support they need to make a healthy transition to adulthood.”

Many have observed that teens are on the fast track. Paul Krouse, publisher of “Who’s Who Among American High School Students,” has been surveying teen-agers for the last 17 years. “There’s no question that the emphasis on drug and alcohol use among teen-agers is incredibly high,” said Krouse of Lake Forest, Ill.

Based on information gleaned from his studies, Krouse estimates that 75% of today’s teens are using alcohol at least once a weekend, and that sex is an expected part of many steady romantic relationships.

As Krouse, who raised four teen-agers puts it, “Twenty years ago, we would have looked at the things today’s ‘popular’ kids are doing, and we would have said, ‘Those are not nice kids.’ ”

What concerns mental health professionals is that hurrying children to grow up stems not from children’s needs, but rather, from those of parents.

In the famous 1924 Middletown study of Muncie, Ind., mothers ranked conformity and strict obedience in their children as the most desired qualities. When the study was replicated more than 50 years later, mothers opted for autonomy and independence.

“There has been a real change in middle-class standards of supervision. Because of many demands, increasingly, parents are finding it desirable and convenient to turn over responsibility for care to the child,” said James Garbarino, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development.

“The problem is, if a 9-year-old gets into the habit of thinking he is responsible for himself, by the time he is 15, he will expect to be treated like an adult and resent parental intervention,” Garbarino said.

Today’s teens are feeling pressured on many fronts. There is some indication that increasing numbers of step-parent families may be spurring teens to leave home earlier.

In a study of primarily middle-class step-parent families, Marilyn Coleman, chairman of the child and family development department at the University of Missouri, noticed that many 18-year-olds were getting married, counter to a national trend toward marrying later. A few 16-year-olds were living alone in apartments. “It seemed to me that a bad relationship with a step-parent was prompting a sizable portion of middle-class kids to leave home sooner and grow up faster,” she said.

More commonly, teens are exercising more power within families, taking some responsibility for shopping, household chores and care of siblings. Fifty percent of teen-age girls and 30% of teen-age boys shop weekly for their families, a statistic that hasn’t gone unnoticed by market researchers.

“Whether they want to or not, teens are the only family members with time to stand in the grocery check-out line,” said Peter Zollo, executive vice president of the marketing firm Teen-age Research Unlimited in Lake Forest, Ill. Arriving at the grocery store, teens have unprecedented control over family income, spending more than $40 billion of their parents’ money annually. Zollo calls them skippies-- “school kids with income and purchasing power”--and says they most resemble yuppies.

Studying teens as consumers, Zollo sees some changes. “On the one hand, today’s teens have more of a sense of purpose. And they are very family-oriented. On the other hand, whereas a few decades ago money was a dirty word, for today’s kids, money is a prime motivator. They are very materialistic,” he said.

An Army of Workers

The quest for money is sending teens into the work force in unprecedented numbers. John Orr of USC was startled to realize that 80% of high school seniors (in the Western region of the United States) are holding jobs. “What struck me is that with the obvious return of mothers to the work force in the past 20 years, the teen-age entrance into the work force in the same period has gone unnoticed,” he said.

Orr estimates that slightly less than half of these high school kids are working 16 hours a week or more, 10% more than 30 hours weekly. In an interesting parallel, he said, “Teens are experiencing the same pressures as working mothers, trying to hold school lives, work lives and home lives together.”

Whether this experience is building character is an open question. But not everyone thinks being busy is bad.

Although he stays up late when things get especially hectic at school, work and home, “Basically, I think it’s a good thing not to be sitting around doing nothing,” said Robert Jenkins, who noted his parents approve of his active life style. “They think if I get involved it is my responsibility to keep up with my commitments, rather than slacking off on school work and doing a poor job at the library.”

Laurence Steinberg, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin’s department of child and family studies, said the teen move into the labor force is fueled by rampant consumerism. Unhampered by paying for necessities such as food and rent, teens become accustomed to large amounts of discretionary income, which they readily spend on the latest clothes, cars and entertainment, raising expectations for a life style they might not be able to afford once independent.

Anxiety Over College

Not surprisingly, young teens are expressing anxiety about getting into college, seen as the ticket to supporting affluent life styles. “Kids are talking about these things in junior high,” said Don Fleming, a Los Angeles psychotherapist.

In Fleming’s view, parents are focusing too much attention on academic achievement and not enough on social and emotional growth that can’t be hastened. “It is just as important to teach children, in increments, to be independent, to get along in the world, to take care of themselves, to get along with others. And it takes time for children to learn these things,” he added.

Observers say that changes in teen-agers merely mirror shifts in adult society. “If you look at adults you will see that adults are more sexually permissive, tolerant of drug and alcohol use and materialistic,” Steinberg said.

But missing out on childhood has its price. “The distinctly human thing that drives human and cultural evolution is a long childhood,” said Garbarino of the Erikson Institute. “Play is an opportunity for developing the best of what is human, and when we deny it, we deny something important to well-being,” he said.

Balance of Values

“Kids are missing out on learning a balance of values,” psychotherapist Fleming said. “Some parents, knowingly or unknowingly, aren’t conveying a sense of the importance of contributing to the world, of caring for others. The real danger is that a whole generation won’t know how to feel empathy.”

“What troubles me now,” Elkind said, “is that we are turning children’s stress into a virtue. Women’s magazines are telling us that being a ‘latchkey’ kid is healthy for children because it teaches kids to be independent. Let’s stop rationalizing that these things are beneficial for children. Instead, we have to recognize that these things are stressful and frightening for children, and help them cope.”