death of childhood, death of adulthood?

This is something I've been wondering about.

For years, I've been hearing people (especially mothers of young girls, it seems) talking about the "death of childhood" - where kids are pushed to be "sophisticated" or "grown up" (really - acting old beyond their years). The sort of trampy clothes sold for pre-teens, the fact that lots of girls seem to give up playing with dolls and such at increasingly early ages, the pressure to start dating so young. (I know of ten year olds who "date." While I realize that's not like, say, 18 year olds "dating," still, it sets up certain expectations that are probably kind of heavy for such a young kid.)

Of course this has come to a head with the talk about birth control pills being offered to girls potentially as young as 11. (Which just blows my mind...digression time...

When I was 11, I was still sewing doll clothes and still playing with my Kermit the Frog doll. I knew the facts of life but was in NO rush to put them to the test. In fact, if you'd asked me at 11 about having sex, I probably would have grudgingly said, "Well, when I'm like 28 and married and if I want to have a baby, I suppose I will HAVE to." I still thought the whole idea was incredibly gross.

Now, granted - for me puberty didn't kick in until 13 or 14, but even then, even at 15 and 16 and 17, I still figured I was not ready. Especially not ready if it meant I might have a kid as a result.

But anyway. I realize it was 25 years ago now, but still...even then...I think I was in a lot of ways a sheltered and kind of backwards kid. I was still interested in teddy bears and dolls when my friends were experimenting with makeup and hairstyles. I refer to having had my first "boyfriend" at 10, but really - he was the first boy I didn't think was icky and that I wanted to talk to. It was incredibly innocent - we sat across from each other in homeroom and we used to talk and laugh. We never even held hands or anything like that.

And you know? Thank God I had those experiences. Thank God I had those innocent times to sort of try things out on, instead of being plunged hardcore into the world of "real" boyfriends and dating and worrying about my appearance and stuff.

And I'm glad I played with toys for as long as I did. I have good memories to look back on - years spent sprawled on the floor building stuff out of Lego bricks. [and, okay, maybe when I was perhaps a bit past the age when it was considered acceptable, I still did play with them - but I had the argument that "but I'm just spending time with my little brother." I was, but I was also playing with the bricks...]. Years spent building forts out of blankets and dining room chairs. Years making my own paper dolls. (I made a lot of paper dolls. When I got older, I'd check books on historical or ethnic costume out of the library and do it under the guise of research or "preparing for a possible career as a fashion designer" but the truth was, I just liked drawing paper dolls and making clothes for them).

At any rate - I had a fairly protracted and carefree childhood. And now I'm an adult, and although I don't always LOVE shouldering all the responsibilities and requirements of being an adult, I do - because I'm an adult and I feel it is expected of me.

And I wonder sometimes if the strength of my childhood has something to do with that - that I was a child for long enough that I was able to build up into being an adult.

(Follow me here).

Another thing that I hear people bemoaning these days is how so many young adults seem to be stuck in a protracted adolescence - they can't buckle down and WORK, they think the world owes them a living, they don't commit to things, they don't take on the 'trappings' of adulthood. (Though that last one, I don't know about - I wear a watch with Eeyore on it and I'm still a responsible adult. And I have Snoopy pillowcases on my bed pillows at this very moment. And there's nothing wrong with that. But....when you have a job interview, you know? You wear "business casual" or better. I've seen people go into interviews in wife-beater shirts and old torn jeans and wonder why they didn't get the job. Perhaps it's not so much always having the 'trappings' of adulthood as much as it is knowing what is appropriate, when.)

And I wonder if the two things - the death of childhood, and the failure of many 20- (and even in some cases, 30-) somethings to fully graduate to responsible adulthood are linked.

One of the things I guess I absorbed during my protracted childhood were ideas of appropriateness. How to behave. How not to behave. What was important, and what was silly. (Didn't C.S. Lewis, in one of his Narnia books, talk about how Susan had fallen away from the belief in Narnia, and instead taken on a "silly" belief in things like lipsticks and skirts? Or something to that effect?).

In drawing my paper dolls, and looking at the books of dresses for inspiration, I think I learned a little bit about why short skirts were sometimes not OK. And why sometimes it was better to be more covered than less. I think I also kind of absorbed the difference between how children and adults dressed.

I think also the hundreds of little comedies-of-manners I put my stuffed toy animals (or the little plastic zoo animals - I had dozens of those and they were almost like a miniature acting troop, the way I played with them) were my mimicking what I saw the grown-ups doing and saying, my trying to make sense out of things. Trying to learn why some behavior was accepted and other behavior was seen as foolish. (And I was lucky in that I had good models - "acceptable" behavior was not the kind of narrow-minded, "but they're not OUR kind of people" attitude some of my friends' parents had; and foolish behavior was, well, behavior that could bring pain or shame to you.)

I do think childhood is important - as a learning process, as a process of watching the adults and trying to learn how to be one. (And I suppose, sadly, some kids don't have much to work with in the way of models, and that may be part of the problem.)

But I wonder - if kids don't have that kind of "lag time" - where they can sit and think about what they hear the grown ups say, and how they watch the grown-ups act, and try to synthesize it into some kind of reasonable whole, if maybe they have problems being grown up themselves.

What I'm trying to say is, a kid who takes on some of the behaviors of adulthood too early may fail to develop other (possibly more important) behaviors.

Or maybe more baldly: if a kid gets cheated out of childhood, maybe they have a harder time successfully growing up into an adult? The little girls running around in tight sparkly t-shirts with double-entendre messages on them, or (God forbid) sweatpants with "Juicy" on the backside, who ape the suggestive moves of dancers on MTV - they maybe have less of a chance of understanding fully what it means to be female, and maybe become stuck in a caricature? Or the boys who base their behavior on the coarse, rude, but somehow "cool" guy on television - they don't learn what it really is to be a man?

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. But sometimes I wonder if there's a link between kids growing up too fast, and their not growing up completely. And I worry about the future of a nation of 45-year-old adolescents.