Children are children, or at least they should be. When I was young, children (I mean under 13 years old) were children: totally innocent, with no worries or worries (except for having returned in time to have tea and do what my parents told me), with no idea what what I wanted to do or what the world was like, happily play cops and robbers or make rose perfume with my friends and my dad’s roses. However, it seems, in my experiences over the past 10 years, that the age of innocence is gone.

Children today are inclined to be wise and old before their time. They want cell phones and social media accounts at the age of 7, they (our 7 and 4 year old daughters) want to wear makeup and high heels. It seems to me that children just want to grow up. They do not want or enjoy being children and are too impatient to wait until they are teenagers. Somehow, at the age of 7 or 8 (this also happened with my ex’s son), they stop wanting to be kids and want to magically turn 16! I’m always trying to tell our 3 kids: “Enjoy it while you can, it’s the best days of your life” – at the risk of sounding like my mother, but God was right! Even explaining that instead of going to school they will go to work, which is not half as fun, incoming bills, difficulties, etc., but they still want to grow.

What are we doing so that our children do not like or get bored of being children? Well, the SATs start in schools around the age of 7 or 8; tests for kids that age are ridiculous. We all know that tests are not fun and that they put a lot of pressure on people. Schools have performance charts to excel and therefore teachers put a lot of pressure on our children.

We are not strict parents, so it can’t be that. Perhaps more relaxed modern parenting techniques mean that children see more and therefore understand more about adult life and find it an exciting idea, so much so that they want to be adults. However, I have noticed that it is more girls than boys who are like this: we are told that men are always behind women in terms of maturity and therefore that could be the reason for the difference. (Our 4-year-old daughter is the way she is, because she idolizes her sister and wants to be like her.)

So what else contributes to the development of our boys, especially when it comes to girls? Is society making our children want to grow up TOO FAST? It could be: I have noticed that the commercials on children’s television show 7 or 8 year olds doing things that we would not have done until they were 12 or 13 years old. There are scooters aimed at this age range (7-8 years old) with makeup trays on them. The media also have a role to play. Things directed at boys are generally less mature than those directed at girls of the same age, such as movies; High School Musical, Camp Rock, Hannah Montana, all apparently aimed at teenagers. However, due to this problem, these films are losing their focus, as they are apparently too young for the modern adolescent. Therefore, they are attractive to the youngest children (especially girls) in the age range of 7 to 8, and these films cover relationships and problems related to life in high school. Movies are exciting and fun and therefore make being older more attractive. In addition, our children try to imitate what they see on the screen, such as dancing and singing, poses and even accents.

With our 7 year old daughter, she has already started to come home from school and tell us who her boyfriends are and who she has been kissing at school; It is good that she is open about it and feels comfortable talking about it, but for my wife and I it is scary. My wife has discussed things with her about 4 years before you would expect to have these conversations. She has asked for a bra a couple of times (!) And she is 7 years old and very slim. The other thing that I have noticed, and I know that all girls want to be like their mother, is that she has a matriarchal streak that has developed and can often be heard trying to be older with our other two children, talking in very grown-up tones, and saying the kinds of things she’s heard my wife and me say.

It’s scary to think that the age of our children’s innocence is disappearing, and it’s a shame. I remember childhood days, playing innocent games without caring about anything in the world. Our children are growing up so fast these days that we need to exercise conscious parenting to try to slow down. If boys remain at their current rate of development, and the rate of development of girls continues to increase, we will have age gap relationships in boys, rather than having a 2-year gap between most couples (as always it happened in the 60s). , 70 and 80) there will be a 4-5 year gap (maybe longer) between most couples in the 2020s when our children mature and begin to settle down. That is doubling / tripling the maturity development of girls in just 50 years; If that continues, in 2070 we will see that our 16-year-old daughter’s first boyfriend will be between 26 and 30 as the norm.

These are not statistics, just my reflections, but a truly terrifying thought nonetheless. So please be conscientious parents and try to prevent our children from growing up too fast – keep toys and media exposure as close to innocence as possible and that way maybe we can delay the rapid development of maturity. of our son and prevent my predictions from coming true, saving the innocence of childhood.