National Post
Saturday, April 01, 2006

BY Anne Marie Owens

It's Saturday night, and as one group of 12-year-old girls prepares to head out for a night at an all-ages dance in Toronto's nightclub core, another group of preteens is busy fussing over their expensive gowns and shoes and wheedling their parents to arrange a limousine for their Grade 8 graduation.

Only in the complicated realm of modern childhood would such disparate events be on the same trajectory — both evidence of what is increasingly becoming a sped-up version of childhood.

In the week that has followed an altercation involving a 12-year-old girl stabbed on the streets of Toronto's Entertainment District at 2:30 a.m. last Saturday, there has been an outcry over parental abdication of responsibilities, calls for a strict children's curfew, and considerable hand-wringing about what kind of society allows its children to be out partying at all hours.

But despite all the tsk-tsk reactions fuelling radio call-in shows in the city this week, is it really all that surprising?

Grade-schoolers are increasingly doing things that once would have been the exclusive domain of teenagehood — whether it's turning the Grade 8 grad into the prom, participating in promiscuous sexual behaviour at ever-younger ages, or grappling with anorexia before they even encounter puberty.

Just yesterday, in a case that hinged on whether sexual dirty talk between adult and child was predatory behaviour, an Edmonton man was acquitted on charges of luring a 12-year-old Ontario girl over the Internet. A few weeks ago, a wild party involving 200 or so mostly Grade 8 students trashed a house in Delta, B.C., causing about $70,000 damage in an unprecedented, large-scale home-wrecking.

Consider the conduct of many 12-year-olds today and this is what you will see: They dress like teenagers, they party like teenagers and they have expectations much more in line with the teenage years than childhood.

Has 12 become the new 15?

"What we're seeing is that everything's been pushed back two or three years, so that 10-year-olds are more like 12-year-olds, and 12 is more like 14 or 15, and so on," says Sara Dimerman, a child and family therapist from Thornhill.

This is the exasperated refrain she hears all the time from the parents she counsels: "My 10-year-old is acting like a teenager."

In her anthology Childhood Lost, Canadian-born academic Sharna Olfman, who teaches psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, pulls together the various complicated factors she says have converged to produce this sense of a childhood being forfeited to everything from ratcheted-up educational expectations to the increasing sexualization of children's fashion.

Children's entertainment is adult entertainment, toy stores are struggling to find ways to keep kids from dumping their playthings, and parents are increasingly uncertain how to navigate the shifting goalposts of age-appropriate activities, she says.

What's particularly interesting, she says, is while childhood seems to be getting more truncated, with kids appearing and behaving older than they are, adolescence seems to be getting longer: Children are beginning puberty at younger ages on one end, and yet remain in post-secondary education and stay in the family home well into their 20s and even beyond.

"At one time, puberty would begin at 14, 15 and they'd be married at 18. Now, you're getting kids as young as nine who have the external veneer, the external trappings of adulthood," she said in an interview. "Children and teens are remaining in this limbo age for a much longer time. Kids are not growing up faster, in fact, they're just looking more grownup faster."

Prof. Olfman says many parents feel burdened by what she says is a cultural overdrive pushing children to adopt more grownup demeanours and behaviours.

"As a parent, you don't want your child to feel as if they're from Mars — you don't want your child to feel completely estranged from their peers," she says. "That's why parents will inadvertently allow the culture to dictate these behaviours and values."

Ms. Dimerman, the Toronto-area family therapist, understands this parental dilemma as a mother who has recently navigated the murky pre-teen realm herself — one of her daughters is 14 — but she too is wary about the complicity of parents in the new reality.

"It's a slippery slope that occurs when children are given too much, too soon," she says.

She has helped her clients struggle with everything from when to allow body piercing, hair streaking, late nights out, cellphones and so on, often encouraging them to hold back even on things which might, on the surface, seem relatively harmless: "If your kid says, 'My friends all stay out till midnight,' you need to say, 'In our house, we get home by 10:30.' If you start out with them staying out till midnight when they're 10, then of course they're going to be out till 2 when they're 12."

Ms. Dimerman says today's parents are more reluctant than previous generations to set limitations or impose consequences for their children, a new parenting dynamic she attributes to factors such as the challenges of parenting after divorce and the increased time crunch of two-income families.

"Parents often don't want to be in their kid's bad books," she says. "They may indulge their children, either with material things, or by not saying, 'No.' "

Indeed, when educators in Windsor decided to put a stop to the momentum they believed was turning the Grade 8 graduation into something resembling a high school prom, they had to deal with the parents who were helping to drive this trend.

"Parents were getting out of hand in renting limousines for their children, and allowing the attire worn by some female students which was inappropriate," says Shannon Porcellini, a trustee with the Ontario community's Catholic school board.

The board now has a policy that dictates these end-of-grade-school celebrations "shall be simple, age-appropriate, faith-based and family oriented," and further, that "extravagances such as limousines and formal attire shall be discouraged as they are neither appropriate nor acceptable at this age level."

Says Ms. Porcellini: "I think it's incumbent on parents and on the school board to ensure that these kids get a chance to have a childhood, and they can't have a childhood if they're dressed like they're 16 or 17 years old."

Toronto's upscale Holt Renfrew now regularly runs special shopping advice sessions for girls trying to figure out what to wear to their Grade 8 graduation.

Christina McDowell, image consultant and national spokeswoman for Holt Renfrew, who runs these sessions, says her challenge is to help these girls navigate the tricky fashion terrain between trashy and cool, a line that is so often blurred in the pages of the tabloid magazines these girls devour, where the sexualized celebrity is extolled.

"There is an acceleration. They are growing up too fast," says Ms. McDowell, who often conducts sessions for a group of 20 girls from the same school's Grade 8 graduating class, often under the watchful eyes of their mothers.

"I want to show them what's cool, but also what's appropriate ... They're just babies — they really are."

© National Post 2006