Where Have All The Children Gone?
Can our children grow up in a society that lets them be children?
The fifteen-year-old I’ve been reading about worries about learning to drive and getting her drivers license, has romantic feelings for a boy her own age, has been kissing that boy and letting him touch her under her clothes, and has asked her aunt to take her to a women’s clinic to get birth control pills. In that young character’s voice, listen to this: “I want to do IT.” That is how she explains the what and why of her intentions.
A thirteen-year-old I read about at the beginning of Summer, bums cigarettes from her parents.
An adult in a forum I used to follow confessed that she became an avid pornography viewer at the age of twelve.
And yet another, just turned fifteen, talked about sitting on the porch with her hippy mother smoking a joint and talking about which of the men her mother had been sleeping with fifteen years ago could have been her father.
And I’ve read some of the literature posted on Quora and watched Dr. Phil episodes on rebellious ‘under eighteen-year-olds’ using their bodies to generate pleasure and money.
What do you make of it? What gives rise to this?
Where have all the children gone?
According to the U.S. government, a child officially becomes an adult when they turn eighteen. So what are we calling all these predispositions that we are not talking about in our culture?
And then we become undone when we hear about child brides and child pornography and child sexual abuse. In other cultures.
Aren’t teenagers still children?
I am no better than anyone but when I was close to fifteen I could follow a recipe, do laundry, manage my own hygiene;
I could smile, had a hobby, had many friends;
I could climb trees like a monkey, play marbles with the boys, and together, full of giddiness we explored almost every inch of our town.
At fifteen, I’d never been on an airplane, had never had an F in school, had never kissed a boy romantically on the lips, had never been trashed and hadn’t even had my first menstruation.
Do you think that perhaps I was a lesser citizen of the world? Perhaps! But there were children in my world when I was growing up and I loved being one of them.
THANKS FOR READING. I Wish You Miracles.
