Ah! I'm beginning to tear chunks of my hair out because there are so many different pressures upon me! My parents are telling me I need to do all of these things, but at the same time are telling me things contradictory to what they were saying in the first place! "You're wise beyond your years. You're growing up so fast. You're so mature. You're more mature than that." It puts so much pressure on a preson to act grown up all the time, and then one slip and all of the sudden your at the bottom of the food chain.
Off of that though, it seems that parents are pressuring their kids to be more mature and grow up faster. Then they will go off and say that they're acting too old, even though just a little while ago they said that they needed to act older and be more mature. Well, the child does that and it just doesn't work. I guess they've become too mature for their age? However, weren't the parents just off telling them that they needed to act above their age, or praising them for doing so. Hold it! Those things are totally contradictory of each other!
I have run into this problem numerous times with my parents. Mainly my mother as I've come to realize recently. She tells me one thing and then goes totally against it. More recently than anything else I can recall other than details I won't bore you with has been my maturity level. She says she gets complements all the time saying that I'm mature beyond my age or wise beyond my years and that she's so proud of me. Basically it's expected for me to act a certain way because of that. However, on occassions when I actually act the age I really am I get in trouble for it because I'm supposed to be the good kid that's mature enough to realize that what I did was a mistake. I have to walk on eggshells all the time and beware the boundaries beacasue if one of the shells crack or I cross a line everything explodes into chaos! EEKERS!
Somebody call the guard, my mother has exploded into little itty bitty pieces of confusion, chaos, and is causing me to hate her! HELP!
Okay, on a more serious not you can disregard pretty much the first paragraph and the little smidgeon of two lines above this little paragraph. It seems like society is pushing us to be older than we really are and then if we act too old we get bludgeoned for it! It's not fair. If they want us to act a certain way they need to set it at our age limit, and then just be proud if we act older than that. If we act our age there sholud be no extreme problems, just the normal getting in trouble-ness that any kid would go through. Not the harsh punishments recieved because you're not acting the age that you've been acting even though it's not technically your age. Wow, I hope that made sense...
Anyone else run into this little problem?
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I think that sometimes it seems we are being punished more just because we are not used to being punished. One time in elementary school, I was given detention. That was not any harsher than any other kid would have gotten, but I was not used to it and it seemed horrible.
However, there does seem to be the pressure to act older, but not just from our parents. Everyone, the media, teachers, peers, seem to want us to grow up too quickly.
~Keri~