When is growing up too fast???

April 8, 2008 chic7854

Personal Essay 3 Draft 2

It seems that over the past few years kids keep growing up faster and faster. From the short skirts we put them in starting from birth that keep getting shorter and sexier as they approach middle school. Since when is a mini skirt that barely covers a child’s ass okay? We have reached a point of holding so little respect for ourselves that we would let our children walk out of the house looking like miniature prostitutes. Children’s clothing companies now design mother-daughter clubbing outfits so that mothers and daughters can go out to the clubs together, and I am not talking about Club Libby Lu. We have become so beauty conscious that we resort to making our children take all means necessary, not stopping short of cosmetic surgery and makeup, so they look perfect. In our society kids are not able to kids anymore.

Throughout the past few decades our image of what’s beautiful has become so skewed that the more bones that are almost protruding through your skin because there is no fat insulating them the more beautiful you are. How do we expect our children after being subjected to this feel? Are we really in so much denial that we believe that our children will not be affected by both this and our constant need for perfection in ourselves through our bodies? According to the website Healthy Place “Parents play a detrimental role, when they create an environment which emphasizes thinness and dieting or excessive exercise as a way to attain the desired body. Specifically, parents may comment on the child’s weight or body shape and this tends to become more common as the children get older.“(Reviewing)

We are supposed to tell our children that they are beautiful the way they are yet now we tell them, “maybe you should lose a little weight.” Why are you eating that, it will make you fat! You are ugly without plastic surgery, no one will want you! We wonder why the eating disorder rate in teenagers has skyrocketed in recent years. Around the country there has been a steady increase in children with eating disorders. Some doctors have even seen children as young as eight years old come in with bulimia. Although both eating disorders can be fatal, it is even more so when it is a young child because they do not understand what they are doing so therapy does not work as much as with teens and adults.

According to Healthy Place, there are certain things that a parent must do in order to either treat or prevent eating disorders in their children which are “create a healthy eating lifestyle…never skip meals, keep your lifestyle active…spend quality time with your child…never force your child to eat…do not criticize your own or your child’s weight, shape or size…encourage your child to become aware of his/her feelings.” (When) These seven things are very important for the parents to know because they are simple things and they are things that can be overlooked in our fast paced society. I used to think that you did not have to tell a parent to spend quality time with their child but with the pace of our society it seems to be very easy for the children to get lost in the shuffle. Our children should never be a second thought they should be a primary thought equal to the thoughts of your self.

I know I have mentioned it twice before but I think it bares repeating the things you say to a child about their weight, shape, or size is never a joke and those words will stay with your child for the rest of their lives. They need all the positive encouragement they can get from their home surroundings because we all know how harsh the outside world can be. There are many people who believe that it is better for the child to get toughened up by someone making fun of them but how does that help the child? It will either make them become a bully who makes fun of other kids or it will make the child so self conscious that they will develop an eating disorder either way it will not be the desired outcome.

Our thoughts that we have about ourselves in regards to our weight, size, and shape can also be detrimental to our children because we don’t always know we have these feelings because they are a part of who we are. As quoted on Healthyplace.com, Colleen Thompson stated “that parents who are themselves preoccupied with body image and weight increase the ranks of childhood anorexics.” (When) As evidenced here we see that what we might know we think or say can be very hurtful to our children because they are constantly mimicking adults and we would never want our children to mimic and eating disorder without even knowing that it is a bad thing.

Anorexia has even been found in children as young as four years old so we no longer have the notion that just because our child is young it can not have an eating disorder. The younger the child begins with strange eating habits and body dysmorphic thoughts the greater their risk of developing a serious life threatening eating disorder when they hit their teenage years. Youth used to be all about happiness and running and playing outside but what have we done to our children so that now all they do is worry about how they look? According to Abigail Natenshon,

“80 percent of 3rd – 6th graders are reported to be dissatisfied with their body, shape, or size. By the time girls are 9 years old, 30 – 40 percent of them have been on diets. The statistic jumps to 80 percent in girls who are ages 10 – 16. With girls reaching puberty at younger ages, it has become natural for youngsters under age 10 to grow increasingly concerned about bodily changes in a society that requires girls to grow thinner as they grow older. Most young girls do not realize that it is normal for pubescent girls to gain 20 percent of their weight in fat.”(Fat Fears)

This notion is very scary to me because why should a nine-year old even know what a diet is let alone be on one. This is very symbolic for how our children’s childhoods are being stolen away from them because they should, in fourth grade, be more worried about what they want to do when they grow up then about the way they look. The final statement that Natenshon makes is most striking because they are not educated to know that this is normal or there might not be as much of a problem as there is now.

Childhood should be about unenviable happiness. It should be the kind of happiness that you spend your whole adulthood trying to recapture. Why is it that we take this from our children hoping to feel it for ourselves? If we are in constant search for it, don’t we realize that our children will too, but yet we still take it? Don’t we realize that we are continuing the cycle where there is no happy ending for either individual?

Our children deserve everything in the world and it is our job to give it to them, although many have been failing miserably at this. We must give it to them constructively so that they can make better decisions in their adult lives. We all started from their age and one day they will be our age so they need to develop the same skills that we have. Although this is true we must look at the time table for this “knowledge”. Do we tell our 5 year old all the troubles in the world that they most likely may fail at a lot of things they try to do? The answer is no but you don’t want to tell a 30 year old that because by then it may be too late. Timing is everything.

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