THE HURRIED CHILD

Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon

by Dr. David Elkind

The book deals with the fact of the pressure for early intellectual achievement and the educational hurrying as one of American society contemporary pressures on children to grow up fast.

Who are the responsible factors for pressure on children?

Parents trying to accelerate children’s acquisition of early skills and abilities; most programs of summer camps for children that offer competitive sports where the daily routine is rigorous, with individual and/or group lessons, practice sessions and tournaments, complete with trophies; the media promoting children fashion derived from adults fashion, teenage sexuality, the use of adult behavior and language.

The gap between the external maturation of children’s behavior and appearance and the internal growth, the emotional development is obvious in children and teenagers.

Parent stress reflects upon children. Parents tend to treat the child as status symbol, as partner, as therapist, as conscience, Dr. Elkind asserts.

The author considers that the American factory model of education hurries children because it ignores individual differences in mental abilities and learning rates and learning styles. Thus children are pressured to meet uniform standards as measured by standardized tests. School is in Dr. Elkind’s opinion an assembly line where there is pressure to increase production, that is the pressure of subject matter at ever earlier ages. Thus school promote sex education, teaching computer programming to young children or instructing them in “thinking skills”.

Another practice in which schools are engaged to hurry children is rotation at an early age. A growing number of schools are rotating elementary school students from one teacher and classroom to another for instruction in different subjects.

Through media children and teenagers are provided with models of emotional and intellectual maturity thus inviting them to behave in wise, mature ways. Dr. Elkind points to the fact that both intellectual and emotional growth cannot be hurried since it occurs in a series of stages that are age-related. Here he refers to the Piagetian approach of the slow and deliberate process of development.

By hurrying children adults stress them causing many harmful consequences such as teenage violence, pregnancy, suicide among the worst.

Adults - parents, school, the media – deprive children constantly yet unconsciously of true play and fantasy.

Dr. Elkind emphasizes the importance of valuing childhood as a different stage in man’s life and respecting children’s right to it.