Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Volume 1, Issue 29
FamilyIntel summarizes significant parenting, marriage, and family relationship books for
todayʼs busy families. This summary is comprised solely of selected excerpts from the book.
The opinions expressed are those of the bookʼs author(s) and not necessarily those of
FamilyIntel. To receive your free summary each week, visit www.familyintel.com.
Parenthood
our new technologies makes child physical camps for children. Although there are still
health an equally important concern. many summer camps that offer swimming,
sailing, horseback riding, archery, and camp
5. The Technologically Empowered Student. fires—activities we remember from our own
The fifth and final innovation of the last childhood—an increasing number of summer
quarter of a century is one that I believe is camps offer specialized training in many differ-
positive and offers the most hope for the ent areas, including foreign languages, tennis,
future of children in our society: the baseball, dance, music, and even computers.
increasing penetration of computer tech-
nologies and programming in our schools. The change in the programs of summer
camps reflects the new attitude that the years
While emphasizing the changes that have of childhood are not to be frittered away by
come about since the first edition of this book, engaging in activities merely for fun. Rather,
I would be remiss if I did not also remark on the years are to be used to perfect skills and
what has remained the same. It still takes a abilities that are the same as those of adults.
mother nine months to carry a baby to term.
The ages at which children learn to walk, There are many other pressures as well. Many
talk, and learn the three Rs have not changed, children today travel across the country, and
even with all the effort to introduce them indeed across the world, alone. The so-called
earlier. Parents are still the major influence on unaccompanied minor has become so common-
children’s overall development, and children place that airlines have instituted special rules
still need our love, our support, and our limit- and regulations for them. The phenomenon is
setting. And what I appreciate now, much a direct result of the increase in middle-class
more than when I first sat down to write this divorces and the fact that one or the other
book, is the importance of free, self-initiated, parent moves to another part of the country
and spontaneous play to the child’s healthy, or world.
mental, emotional, and social development.
The media too, including music, books, films,
and television, increasingly portray young
Our Hurried Children people as precocious and present them in
Today's child has become the unwilling, more or less explicit sexual or manipulative
unintended victim of overwhelming stress— situations. Such portrayals force children to
the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social think they should act grown up before they
change and constantly rising expectations. are ready.
In too many schools kindergartens have now Not surprisingly, the stresses of growing up
become "one-size-smaller" first grades, and fast often result in troubled and troublesome
children are tested, taught with workbooks, behavior during adolescence.
given homework, and take home a report
card. The result of this educational hurrying
is that from 10 to 20 percent of kindergarten
children are being "retained" or put in “The concept of childhood, so vital to
"transition" classes to prepare them for the the traditional American way of life,
academic rigors of first grade! is threatened with extinction in the
society we have created.”
Another evidence of the pressure to grow up
fast is the change in the programs of summer
‣ Learning to Be Social
If you liked this summary,
‣ How Children React to Stress click here to buy the book.
From The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon (25th Anniversary Edition) by
David Elkind, Ph.D. Copyright © 2001, 1988, 1981 by David Elkind. Preface for the
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition copyright © 2007 by David Elkind. Summarized by
permission of the publisher, Da Capo Press.
288 pages. $16.95. ISBN-10: 0-7382-1082-X; ISBN-13: 978-0-7382-1082-7.
Summary Copyright © 2009 by FamilyIntel, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this
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