Are today's youth trying to grow up too fast?

Yes

1 of 3

by Dorothy Hoffman

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I suspect every generation, as they get older, views the younger generation in a negative light. They don't share our values, don't understand the world, think they know so much more than we do. They are either growing up too fast or not fast enough.

When I was in high school and college, many adults of my parents' generation thought the youth of our day were spoiled, perpetual adolescents who weren't willing to go out and get real jobs, marry, have kid - weren't willing to shoulder the responsibilities of adulthood. Today, though, it seems like the carefree years of childhood are evaporating - a quaint luxury of the "good old days" when kids could be kids, at least until they moved out, got married, and started their first job.

I do think young people are growing up too soon, today. There seems to be little time in children's lives to just be kids. Many parents have their children's lives mapped out for them before they're even born - from attending the best preschools and private schools to enrolling in the most prestigious colleges and snagging high-paying jobs. Children have to jump onto the fast track to success, it seems, the moment they take their first breath.

In school, the incessant standardized testing puts pressures on kids from kindergarten on to perform to other people's expectations. Even before high school, it seems, many students feel the need to focus on getting into the right college and choosing the right career path. The application process for most universities today is far more demanding than in the past. Applications are often expected to have impressive resumes of extracurricular activities, write sterling essays and endure job-application type interviews to prove themselves worthy of acceptance. It's no wonder cheating on exams and buying ready-made papers and even admissions essays online are booming industries.

The exorbitant cost of high education also puts adult pressures on teenagers to take on enormous debt before they've even finished their educations. After graduation, they face years of monthly payments before they can even break even.

Things were very different for earlier generations. I can't remember anyone studying for SATs. They were important, but no tests in elementary and high school had the kind of make-or-break feel to them that they have now. Your future wasn't riding on one exam. Most middle class kids could afford college without mortgaging the next 20 years of their lives, and unless you were applying for the most exclusive schools, you were sure to get in if your grades and SAT scores were reasonably good. No one expected you to prove you'd be an asset to the college's reputation.

When I was in college, it was a time for exploration, learning about the world, experimenting (sometimes not too wisely). I was far from unique in my graduating class in not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, but it seemed, then, there was plenty of time to try one thing and another, take time off for travel, go to graduate school, or just goof off for awhile, without fear that you'd fall so far behind your contemporaries, you'd be a failure before you even got started.

Graduates facing hard economic times, with a shrinking job market and tens even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, simply don't have much time for "finding themselves." And I think that's a terrible loss. It's a loss to the youth of today and it may be an even greater loss to society.

But that's only part of the picture. Time itself seems to move at an accelerated pace these days. Young people have to learn quicker, absorb experiences faster, sort through a mind-boggling amount of data - some important but most ephemeral and insignificant. The Internet has been a wonderful source of global communities and offers more democratic access to information, opinions, culture and social interactions than any previous generation of youth had. I think this is a wonderful thing, but it is also overwhelming at times, and especially for those still too young to have fully formed their own personalities or developed their own viewpoints. No one today really has the luxury to wander down a few wrong paths before finding their way in the world. Too much damage can be done when you have to make major life decisions before you have all the knowledge and skills to understand their implications.

Very young children now seem to be wrestling with issues people in my generation weren't faced with until they were leaving home for college or going out on their own - issues of sexuality, work, consumerism. I was amazed to hear a few years after I had graduated that kids in college were getting credit cards in their own name, even though they had no source of income. That was unheard of when I was a student. Now credit card companies market to high schoolers and younger, encouraging kids to be "good consumers" before they have any real understanding of money and finances.

Fashions designed for preteen girls would have gotten a high school senior expelled in early times, and elementary school age children are exposed on a regular basis to drugs, sex, and violence not only in entertainment and the media but in what should be the safe havens of their schools and neighborhoods.

I don't envy young people today. This is not an easy world to be growing up in. The pressures and problems their elders have burdened the children of the early twenty-first century with are more than many adults could handle. I don't envy the parents of children today, either. I would not want to have to deal with the dilemmas they face in trying to raise the next generation to be healthy, balanced, and competent adults in a world we've left so damaged.

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