The rate of maturity and development of children today
When last did you take a close look at your kids below ten years of age? Last year, my son was 8 going on 9, even though he always seemed to me to be 8 going on 18!
He came up to me at home before his last birthday and announced almost proudly to me, “Dad, there is hair growing on my body around the penis!”
I took a look and saw some fuzz but thought nothing of it but mentioned it to his mother – he had developed some hair on his legs even as a 5 or 7-year old – because I had wanted to scare her by reminding her about the technical possibility of our becoming a grandparents soon.
Then, just last week, as if according to a self-fulfilling prophecy, the unthinkable happened! No, he got no girl pregnant. However, he had complained to his mother about his scrotum ‘paining’ him as he got up from the chair after doing his school homework.
She promptly sent him over to me for further investigation. He told me that he had felt some pain in the ‘penis area’ as he got up from the chair he had been sitting on.
I asked him to pull his shorts down and, lo and behold, was a shocker. My nine-year old had some long curly hair in the pubic region and his apparently mature testicles had come down, hanging from their scrotal sacs!
Coolly and calmly keeping my observations and thoughts to myself, I advised him to remember that he was now a big boy and that he should not get up from a sitting position without first spreading out his legs a bit and to also walk so that his thighs would not clip or bunch/box in his testicles or penis.
Visibly relieved, he said, “Thank you, Dad.”. As he left, and later on during discussions with my wife, I began to wonder what this world was coming to, what exactly was happening.
Why should pubic hair be appearing on a young boy at the ripe old age of nine (9) years? Why, in my own time, I think it was at 12 or 13 years of age that I noticed anything odder than light fuzz there.
In my son's case, it was only late last year that I saw and digitized a remarkable paper-and-Biro-ink cellphone that he had created with some loose sheets of paper.
Picture the following as a real flip N90 camera phone from - tee-hee - Nokia:
This experience reminded me of an old post of mine published last year and dealing with the topic of whether today’s children should be described as young adults or adult children.
The post, and two other related posts on the modern twenty-first century child, are republished below for your information.
Enjoy, if you can bring yourself to do so in this kind of worrying topic…
Should They Be Called Young Children Or Small Adults?
Everyone has a relatively clear idea of who an adult is or what it means to be an adult. The definition of an adult is as set out in the statute books of various countries.
The legal yardstick normally used can vary from the voting age to marriageable age, from licensed drinking age to driving age, and from post-minor age to age of inheritance for heirs to estates.
Please feel at ease to correct and/or add anything that I may have left out, included erroneously, or overlooked in the preceding examples.
From the traditional and legal definition of adulthood in different countries worldwide, it dawned on me that the definition of who or what a child is was really a default differentiation with regard to who or what an adult is.
Perhaps, that’s why many countries have taken, or are now taking, a second look at what a so-called child can or cannot do. And, believe me, there are very few things – and getting fewer by the half-decade – that a modern child cannot do, even today.
Take, for example, the case of three boys who first kidnapped and then went on to rape a girl. Oh, well, these teenagers, one may exclaim resignedly: nothing new in that crazy act!
However, it might surprise you to learn that the boys were aged 8 and 9, while the girl was 11 years old. So, are these still young children or small adults? How should their crime be treated? Certainly, these ‘modern’ children are no longer babies by any known estimation. Some excerpts from that story:
[…"The juvenile victim stated that an 8-year-old boy and two 9-year-old boys that she had been playing with earlier pulled her into a wooded area, where one of the boys raped her," Dennard said.
The three boys — an 8-year-old and two 9-year-olds — were charged with rape, kidnapping, false imprisonment and sexual assault, Dennard said. They were due in juvenile court Monday afternoon. Their names were being withheld because of their age.
Acworth Police Chief Mike Wilkie said one of the boys was accused of threatening to hit the girl with a rock before the assault occurred.
Wilkie also said the investigation is "far from over," and investigators are looking into claims that after the incident, the girl talked about it with her friends at a slumber party.
The father of the 8-year-old boy said his son had been falsely accused. Any sexual activity was consensual, and the girl accused her playmates only after her parents had learned she had sexual relations, said Brandon LeBlanc.
"There was no violence involved," LeBlanc said. "This is a clear case of a girl who didn't want to get in trouble with her parents."…
Prosecutors had not received the case report from police on Monday, nor had they decided whether to try the suspects as adults.
"That decision hasn't been made," said Kathy Watkins, a spokeswoman for the Cobb County District Attorney's office. She had no further comment.
Acworth, 30 miles northwest of Atlanta along the shores of Lake Allatoona, is a town of about 17,000.
Acworth police said their department has never before investigated allegations of rape where all the parties were this young.
"This wouldn't be normal anywhere, but especially not Acworth," Dennard said….]
Yes, that “wouldn’t be normal anywhere” is the controlling phrase in that story. So, what is normal for modern children? Well, new research on children has given a few more pointers about how to evaluate the developmental capacity of children at the toddler stage.
The new research shows clearly that children develop ‘social intelligence’ or adult characteristics of cognitive perception, communication skills, and decision-making effectiveness at a very tender age. The findings and methodology of this new research work on babies are as follows:
[…"By six months, babies have learnt quite a lot and they are taking things in," said Kiley Hamlin, lead author of the research.
"We can't say that it is hard-wired (exists in a newborn baby) but we can say it is pre-linguistic and pre-explicit teaching," she told BBC News.
"We don't think this says that babies have any morality but it does seem an essential piece of morality to feel positive about those who do good things and negative about those who do bad things - it seems like an important piece of a later more rational and moral system."
Infant lab tests
Like all social creatures, humans are able to make rapid judgements of other people based on how they behave towards others. But the roots of this behaviour and when it develops are not well understood.
Kiley Hamlin and colleagues at Yale University devised experiments to test whether babies aged six and 10 months were able to evaluate the behaviour of others. They used wooden toys of different shapes that were designed to appeal to babies.
The babies were sat on their parents' laps and shown a display representing a character trying to climb a hill.
The climbing character, which had eyes to make it human-like, was either knocked down the hill by an unhelpful character (a toy of a different shape and colour) or pushed up the hill by a helper cartoon figure (another shape and colour).
After watching the "puppet show" several times, each baby was presented with the helper and hinderer toys and asked to pick one.
All of the 12 six-month-old babies tested and 14 of the 16 10-month-olds reached out to touch the helper character rather than the anti-social one.
Further experiments were carried out to rule out other explanations for the behaviour - such as a preference for pushing up or down actions or the appearance of certain characters.
"Our findings indicate that humans engage in social evaluation far earlier in development than previously thought, and support the view that the capacity to evaluate individuals on the basis of their social interactions is universal and unlearned," the authors wrote in Nature.
Social creatures
Evidence that babies so young show some social intelligence comes as no surprise to Kiley Hamlin. She said one message for parents is that babies are able to figure out a lot on their own.
"They are quite competent social creatures early on," she said. "They figure out the good guys to hang out with without much help."…
"These interactions we can imagine are a foundation for social understanding but I'm not sure yet they truly reflect social understanding in the sense we would apply to an adult or older child."
Previous research has shown that babies in the first six months of life show preferences for others based on the attractiveness of their face.
But it is not until the age of 18 months that toddlers are true social creatures, and will cooperate with others of their own accord.]
Eighteen months! That means that eight-year-olds would literally be old hands at whatever they had previously been practicing or exposed to, with much unsupervised-session help from the ubiquitous boob tube and unrestricted or unlimited Net access!
No wonder the three boys in the first story above could willfully lure, kidnap, threaten and rape the girl with relative ease.
Or, should that have been willfully permitted consensual/cooperative sexual ‘assault’? No pun intended.
In view of the findings above, it becomes apparent that the child matadors from Spain and in Mexico, especially, are not really being abused or used by anybody.
They seem to know what they are doing and have chosen their future profession, despite all the mortal risks involved in daring a raging and monstrous animal in a bullring.
The following extract is from a story from the viewpoint of the children involved in bullfighting:
[Michelito Lagravere Peniche, 9, put his fingers to his head to create mock horns and charged at Jairo Miguel, 14, who gracefully dodged him on the first pass. But Michelito was an aggressive bull and he circled back, this time striking his friend Jairo in the leg. Both boys erupted in laughter….
They are not allowed to fight professionally in Spain, but baby-faced bullfighters are the rage throughout Mexico. Even though some of the school-age children appearing at the country’s scores of bullrings are not much taller than the bulls they confront, these mini-matadors have begun getting top billing from promoters, who view them as a new way to bring people to the arena.
It is difficult to know exactly how many of them are fighting across the country, and no Mexican law limits their age. Regional and national bullfighting groups consider the bullfighters’ experience when matching them with the bulls, with the youngest and least experienced starting with year-old bulls.
Still, the children confront very real danger in the ring, and their fights still end with the traditional killing of the bull. As their appearances have grown more frequent, so, too, has criticism from those who say they should find a safer extracurricular activity.
Jairo, an apprentice bullfighter who is following in the footsteps of his father, knows the danger better than most. A Spaniard who began his professional career in Mexico at 12, Jairo was gored so seriously on April 15 in Aguascalientes that he was near death. The bull, named Hidrocalido and weighing in excess of 900 pounds, pierced his left lung, coming within an inch of his heart.
“We’ve had the opportunity to take care of other bullfighters but nothing this serious,” said Dr. Alfredo Ruiz Romero, the surgeon who treated him. “And he’s the youngest bullfighter we’ve seen. He’s a boy.”
To make that point, Dr. Ruiz recounted how Jairo watched cartoons in his hospital bed in the days after the accident. As for whether he is too young to face bulls, Dr. Ruiz demurred.
“It’s a question that’s hard to answer,” he said. “There are many risks in life. I doubt the father is forcing him to do this. He may be influencing him, but this boy wants to be a bullfighter. When you talk to him, you see that. He’s serious about it.”
After a few months of rehabilitation in Spain, where people under 16 are prohibited from bullfighting, Jairo was back in the ring in Mexico. But on Sept. 2 he was gored again, this time with a gash of nearly six inches in his buttocks. Still, Jairo insisted on killing that bull before being treated, winning plaudits for bravery in Mexico City’s bullfighting press.
Despite the run-ins, Jairo shows no interest in hanging up his sequined suit and forgoing the thousands of dollars — and potentially tens of thousands of dollars — he can make for every bull he kills.
“I’ve never thought of quitting,” he said. “I’ve spent my life doing this. This is what I love.”…
As for the dangers bullfighters face, he is philosophical.
“We’re just normal people but we have a profession that puts us in dangerous spots,” he said. “Motorcycles and cars have even more deaths. But the car, you can control. A bull thinks for himself.”]
Quite very deep, for a teenager, wouldn’t you say, while others played their iPods and rather callously broke some romantic hearts elsewhere all around Planet Earth?
Well, anyway, there had been a series of posts that I had been doing about the development of a little girl who is precious to me and very close to my heart.
However, Google Blogger put paid to that plan last year by deleting that blog without so much as a reason for the callous act - particularly painful because the posts had no backup copies and there existed, even till now, no default automatic post mail-in by e-mail for newly published posts.
So, instead, I hope that you will also enjoy the two related old posts below.
CAN YOU REALLY BUILD A BRAINIER CHILD?
Are you obsessive or insecure about keeping up with the latest fads for child development? Just how far would you be willing to go for your under-two year old?
I have known some parents who have pushed their youngsters to the brink of exhaustion by overloading them with so much verbal and visual information that the poor dears simply become confused from being too young to grasp the subtleties of the practically adult-level material they are expected to imbibe in order to impress the targeted audience.
The excerpt below is courtesy of the MSNBC website and seems to think differently from the norm :
“{Nobody knows just how many books, CDs, television shows, toys or activity classes are sold based on the premise that smart kids are made by exposing babies to the proper brain and body stimulation from the minute they open their eyes.
The premise behind this “smarter baby” craze isn’t a bad one, says Claire Lerner, director of parenting resources for Zero to Three, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the healthy development of babies and young children.
“The attention to brain development lately has really elevated people’s awareness and understanding of how important the early years are socially, emotionally and intellectually,” says Lerner.
“That’s a good thing. But, unfortunately, there’s also been a downside. Now it’s causing many parents a tremendous amount of anxiety and pressure.”
Bad parents?
Savvy marketers, says Lerner, have convinced parents that if they don’t use certain products and programs, they’re being negligent. It’s not only not true, but some of the products could actually be counterproductive, experts say.
“As far as infant videos, DVDs and computer programs, for example, a lot of developmental or educational claims are made implicitly or explicitly in terms of testimonials but most of the claims are outlandish and completely false,” says Dimitri A. Christakis, director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time, in fact, in the first two years of life.
Studies have found that even programming such as "Sesame Street" that may be beneficial to older children could be ill advised for babies, says Christakis.
“Heavy television and computer usage for children under 2 has been associated with attention problems, as well as cognitive and linguistic delays — no matter what the packaging claims,” he says.}”
Xbox 360 Update From Microsoft
Microsoft has introduced new software to give parents more control over how much time kids spend playing computer games. Announced just last week, it will be available as a free early Christmas system update download.
The school homework, class projects and assignments, and chores at home can get more attention now from both ‘JR’ and ‘Pretty’, if she’s gaming inclined.
All a parent has to do is set the timer of the Xbox 360 family timer and watch other things of interest. Of course, only if ‘Junior’ is not a subtle hacker himself!
Related news story and posts/back links:
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