Childhood should be  all about playing, imagining and riding a bike with your friends. Unfortunately kids nowadays are rushing into puberty and adulthood. Modern culture is ruining childhood because young people are trained to act as adults.

Kid’s most popular trends now are trying to mimic the actions of elders. Take beauty pageants for little girls, people go watch their young daughters walk down the runway in a swimsuit which reveals their undeveloped body and think it’s “cute”. Parents often see this as playing around, but really they are depriving them of a healthy, childish experience growing up.

As important as the past idea was, this one is much more concerning. The rate of alcohol consumption in underage youngsters has shockingly increased; ¾ of U.S parents,  according to Andrew Hough a researcher who inspects child behavior, allow their 16 year old kids to drink alcohol. Children often do this, not to get drunk, but to become popular amongst their fellow companions.

Part of ruining a child’s childhood is over educating it. Parents expect their (balanced) kids to be the best at school, and that’s understandable, but there should be a balance between school work and play time. School is not the only way to learn, there are important values learned while playing, like sharing, coexistence with one another, as well as brains skills such as cognitive and reflexive aspects. Skills that staring at a screen all day or participating in a beauty pageant won’t really teach. Recent research done by Deborah J. Leong and Elena Bodrova supported by Scholastic says, “There is a growing body of research that shows a link between play and the development of cognitive and social skills that are prerequisites for learning more complex concepts as children get older.”

A solution to this problems is for parents to study their kids, and make awareness about how the culture and society is leading kids to be bad human beings. Parents should have limits with everything and surely have certain standards about the way they are raising their children.

As modern culture ruins children one by one, we sit back and relax. Kids don’t really realize how important childhood is and how much they are going to miss it when they become adults. So let’s take action on it and let us not leave our children out in the open and start teaching them to value their childhood before rushing in to the stress of being adults.