EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
KID
QUIPS
“One night, my 3-year-old asked me if she could sleep in my bed. I told her no. She said, “That’s not fair! Why does Daddy get to sleep in your bed?” READ MORE
Early Years
|
||||
|
If there is some way I can get a nickel each time a grown-up friend remarks on my 3-year-old’s age, height, or vocabulary, I’ll have enough money to send him to Harvard, and to enroll him there by the time he is 12. They grow up so darn quick, don’t they? What, 3 already? Seems like only yesterday! Clever as he may be, now or at age 12, we hope to postpone his admission to Harvard. He’s not maturing all that fast, though it seems the cliché about kids growing up too quickly is a real issue in these days of vanishing, sometimes stolen, childhoods. Luckily, this scary phenomenon seems pretty remote at our house. In fact, our little guy burst into tears the day before his third birthday, confessing that he “wanted to be 2 all weekend.” While he has finally reconciled to his age in all other ways suggesting the rank and privilege of 3, some mornings he still wakes up announcing somewhat coyly that he wants to be 2 again. Per the advice of a friend, I no longer object or insist. That only earned me more tears and grief and operatic sighs suggesting his nostalgia for the good old days of, well, last month. Instead, I say, “OK. Today you’re 2.” There is no harm in this form of play, as my friend points out. He’s working something out, and at least he doesn’t want to be 1 or want to be un-potty-trained or revert to eating applesauce and mashed potatoes and crawling. I speculate that his anxiety, if that’s what it is, is the same as that which we confront as adults. My son just has an early case. He needs to be “2” a bit longer, just as Jack Benny needed, famously, to be 39. So we let him. He’ll pretend to be 2 now, and maybe in a year, 3 will look pretty darn good, and he’ll insist on that for a few months. A birthday is, of course, largely a symbol of growth. A symbol, a suggestion, a bit of advice. It is a gentle reminder from the real world and not a science report. It’s a poetical reflection of the development that happens when you are not noticing, a process that often can’t be measured in candles or fingers held up with a cheerful accounting: “this many.” Children assume differing rates of growth physically, emotionally and cognitively. Any kid is only one pediatrician’s visit away from being demoted from his “percentile” or being elevated to the next. These days, most parents likely worry that their children’s social behaviors don’t match their socially-constructed age, that their children at early ages mimic the behaviors of much older children, even adults. That kind of growing up too soon is, in fact, a real problem. Children need childhoods. They need to be children in order to grow up and become healthy, whole adults, Jack Benny’s denial problem notwithstanding. Leapfrogging past childhood can be damaging. Media critic Neil Postman noted this phenomenon over 20 years ago with the publication of his prophetic book, “The Disappearance of Childhood.” Postman pointed out then what’s now even more obvious: Potent popular media images inspire, even provoke, a premature and dangerous embrace of adulthood or at least a version of adulthood as presented by action he-boys and sexy she-girls, and marketing inventions like teenager and, lately, “tweens,” God help us. Television and film and music all invented by adults are dominated by images of hyper-mature hipster kid sophisticates who swish and sass and bluster and offer plenty of ’tude in clumsy mimicry of what they are told to imagine is adulthood. And our kids, quick studies, see and increasingly become it. A typical parental response? Resignation. A shrug. A sigh: “What can you do? They grow up so fast these days.” But our kids and their childhoods are too important to hand over to forces that steal their futures by messing with their present. We can’t afford to resign ourselves. Why is adulthood offered no, marketed to children at all? In our country, children perceive adulthood via images of it manufactured by commercial media. That perception leads, logically, to their appropriation of behaviors seen as “adult” drinking, profanity, sexual sophistication, talking fast and thinking not much at all. These behaviors insult adults, who seem to have gotten used to it, and are a peril to children. They are the sensationalist invention of a commercial culture that cannot seem to find something honest to tell about childhood and family, and so sell instead a sexed-up creation. Adults can tell the difference, or should be able to. Children lack the intellectual self-defense mechanisms to differentiate between, say, prime-time families and their own. We’ve all seen the result in neighborhood kids who adopt Austin Powers lingo even as the meaning and implications of the character go way, way beyond their comprehension. If, indeed, the kid could recite the lyrics to Casey Jones or Bible verses or poetry or was pretending to be a real person, well, we’d have to hold adults to that standard, too, wouldn’t we? In other words, we need to hold ourselves to the standards we hope our children will adopt. We need to remember the purpose of childhood: to let children be children. That means acting more like adults, like grown-ups, ourselves. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
