Parents are mixed: they don't want their child to grow up too fast, but they feel complimented when friends say, "Your child acts so grown up!" Although they want to delay exposure to adult information and life experience until they feel their child is old enough to responsibly manage it, when their child acquires performance skills and sophisticated understandings beyond the norm for her age, they feel proud about this advanced level of accomplishment.
Through the childhood years up to about age 8 or 9, parents often feel pleased by seeing precocious growth; however, come the advent of early adolescence (ages 9 - 13) and the child developing more worldly curiosity and interests, they usually want to slow that speed of growth back down. "You're too young for that!" "You're not ready!" "You're not allowed!"
The early adolescent, however, is not about to throttle back without complaint. Consequently, for the rest of adolescence parents encounter protest and resistance when they want to delay or deny the child's pleas for them to stop acting "overprotective" and let her do what, in her words, "all my friends are allowed to do." Now the time for thankless parenting has arrived - taking stands for the young person's best interests against what she wants and getting rewarded with criticism and conflict for your efforts.
But this is often the parent's job during adolescence: to act as a drag on their teenager's urgency for freedom, particularly if he chooses to run with a "fast" crowd. "Fast" refers to the hurry they are all in to act grown up. So if your son or daughter chooses to run with a "slow" crowd, quiet and conservative, appreciate how "slow growing" he or she is content to be. Many of the serious troubles that adolescents get into are "speed violations," taking on too much older experience too soon.
Of course, healthy children want to act "grown up." This is why they push for older knowledge, experience, and freedom. This is why the young child is curious about what older children know, wants to try what older children are able to do, and pushes for the latitude of choice older children seem to have. This is why freshman year in high school increases the push for more independence as the teenager sees how all the upper classmen are now acting and wants to act those ways too.
The job of healthy parents is to restrain this push within the limits of safety and responsibility, to moderate the child's speed of growth. When they say "no" to a request for a cell phone or a later curfew, they aren't saying, "not ever." They are saying "not now" or "not yet." They are playing for delay in the hopes that with evidence of more maturity, the child will handle this increased degree of freedom more responsibly.
If only the parents were concerned with the child's wants, that would be simple. However, the reality is that they feel ganged up on by the child's peers, the popular culture, and the market place who are all urging them to provide or allow what is recently available and so desirable, what is now normal and so supposedly okay. Here the market place exploits young people's desire to grow up fast by selling young people on the glamour of looking and acting older than their years.
For example, today most children want to be technologically up to speed with their peers lest by falling behind they get left behind or left out. So your twelve-year-old daughter wants to be adequately equipped when it comes to communication with friends. She wants to have a cell phone, wants to instant message, wants to join a chat room, wants to blog or twitter, and wants to be on Facebook.com or Myspace.com. Or your twelve-year-old son wants to play interactive computer games with strangers on line, like his friends are allowed.
What's a parent to do? Understand how to moderate speed of growth.
Children who have the highest speed of growth are those who are given the most freedom of choice. By restricting that choice based on family values, parental supervision, and evidence of responsibility in the child, parents can moderate that speed in six areas of the child's life by influencing timing:
When the child gets to know and understand about certain parts of life;
When the child gets to watch and see certain entertainment;
When the child gets to dress a certain way;
When the child gets to possess and purchase certain resources and products;
When the child gets to go and explore certain places;
When the child gets to associate with certain companions.
Using this framework of decision-making, a ten-year-old
who is given unrestricted access to the Internet (knowing),
who is exposed to a lot of self-selected R-rated entertainment (watching),
who is allowed to wear older clothing to assume an older image (dressing),
who is given money on demand (discretionary spending),
who is allowed to hang out at the mall (exploring),
who has friends who are significantly older (association),
is likely to have a pretty fast speed of growth.
Both parent and child have the same objective: they want the child to grow up. Parents, however, don't want the child to grow so fast that he or she is in danger of "crashing" and getting hurt. This is why they attend very closely to requests for new freedom by the child, basing their permission on evidence of sound decision-making he or she has shown.
Come early adolescence (ages 9 - 13), a young person naturally wants to act more grown up, and when puberty arrives, they want to act and look more like a young man or a young woman as well. This is the age when your daughter may want to dye her hair, paint her nails, wear more form-fitting clothes, and make up her face, all in service of looking more young womanly in her own eyes and those of her peers. So what is a parent to do? Just give in because her daughter is now in a hurry to look older? I don't think so.
First the parent has to declare a willingness to talk about any grown up change or freedom that her daughter may want. Her daughter needs to understand, however, that talking does not guarantee permission. Talking is for creating more understanding between them. So in this case the mother might say, "You are welcome to put any request or issue in play for discussion between us because I am interested in all the ways you want to grow. I want to be able to listen to what you have to say, and to give you the benefit of what I have to say."
In this case some of what the mother wants to say could include the reality that in adolescence, a young person gets treated as old as they look. "The older you make yourself look, the older you are likely get treated, so let's think about the kinds of treatment you might be inviting and whether you really want to be treated that way or not - or at least not yet." Then the mother might make some accommodation. "At this point, I am comfortable with you playing with your appearance these ways at home, but not at school, or out in the world."
Of course, there are a lot of children who grow up very fast, very responsibly. For example, I have seem many children of single parents who, because they share much of the family and household load, become very responsible at an early age, experienced at making complicated decisions very well, becoming very self-reliant and reliable for the parent to depend upon.
Also, there are young people who physically mature at an early age. Actually thirteen, they appear sixteen or seventeen, and that is how the world treats them. Adults may expect older age knowledge and responsibility based on a more mature appearance, and become critical when it is not forthcoming. And older teenagers may assume experience and interest equivalent to their own. Like it or not, when it comes to a young person's appearance, the world does "judge a book by its cover."
Thus parents of an early physically maturing adolescent need to anticipate their son or daughter is going to be invited to keep older company and is going to want social freedoms earlier than other young people of his or her actual age.
The key to this complicated parenting is some compromise and really adequate communication. The parent needs to say: "I understand that because of how you look and how the world treats you, you are going to want to grow up faster than other people your age. I will give on some, but not on all of these requests. But I will only do so if you agree to have full and open discussions with me about the freedom you want before the fact so we can talk about how to keep it safe. Then I want full and open discussion after the fact so I can help you learn all you can from the experience."
