Giving Children a Real Childhood

Alison
ESem Paper #4
September 25, 2015
Giving Children a Real Childhood
People believe that kids are carefree. The childhood is always depicted as a fairy tell with lots of fun, games, candies and flowers. Just as Molly Knefel said in “Kid Stuff” : “the mythical childhood of the mainstream imagination turns children into two-dimensional cartoons, devoid of emotional depth, and immune from the world’s oppressive structures.” (Knefel, Kids Stuff) However, this statement is not completely true. Besides the problems of “Fitting in, standing out, dealing with authority, being lonely, never being alone, being different” (Knefel, Kids Stuff) on the individual levels, kids also suffer from the negative emotions and concerns, especially in a highly competitive environment. Thus, kids are losing their blithe childhood and even the ability to have fun when they are overwhelmed by the consciousness of competition and success. The article “Kid Stuff” and the experience of Yuri, one of my classmate, provide evidence to exemplify this opinion.
In Yuri description of her experience in childhood, she said she was very competitive when she played. She had some interesting games such as riding unicycle, exercising on the bar, and doing jigsaw puzzles in order to show her accomplishments to her mother and get praises form her instead of having fun. Due to her competitive personality, she “was better at the horizontal bar than anyone”.(Hamashima, A super competitive girl)
I am not surprised by Yuri’s thought at all. The main reason is that I have the similar feelings as her when I was a child. Basically, children become more competitive as they are unawares implanted the idea of competition taught by their parents while they are studying, and they apply this patterns of behavior in everything they do. Just as Yuri mentioned that she wanted to make her mother happy by seeing her accomplishments, adults also want to push their kids and see what they can achieve. The reasons are diverse: the parents want to be proud of their kids and the  environment makes they decide in this way as their kids cannot keep a foothold in the society easily if they don't have something to prove themselves, such as certifications or good grades. The kids have the consciousness that they must study hard or they cannot get in to middle school when they are in primary school, and if they do not work well they cannot get in to high school when they are in middle school. It is an endless loop and most children experience this afraid emotion through their whole childhood if they are in the similar situation.
When this competitive thoughts applied to play, it is more obvious for us to detect the reasons that children cannot completely enjoy childhood. When we were kids, playing together was the main way to help us find friends. There is a winner and a loser in many games. Whether it is seeing who can run in the playground the fastest, or who can find the most people in hide-and-seek. For a child, it is common to play the games with competition. The friendship is not destroyed by not winning in one game because they play freely and they will not take it seriously. But when a child intendedly play because he or she want to get satisfaction or praises from for winning, it is not common anymore. There are pressure, stress and in the game and he or she is afraid of losing. And it can also hurts others, just like Yuri described that she always won against her little brother because she “is older and better in everything," which hurts his confidence. And she became mean to him in order to get more attention from her mother, for example, she said “she loved me more than you” to him. In this case, there in an underlying competition between she and her brother, and she wanted to win. This cannot be defined as play anymore, and children will get satisfaction from winning, but not the fun form playing. 
However, the children also have the blithe and funny aspects even though they are exposed to many works. Molly Knefel found that “adults are fine at having fun, given the right circumstances, but kids do it automatically”. And “Children can barely stop playing, whereas adults need to make the effort to schedule it in.” These description fits in the expectations of the nature of children, but not the expectation of parents. Traditionally, people believe that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. Nowadays, when the society becomes more and more competitive, parents view their kids’ future successes as more important than their happiness. Children are burdened the pressure of huge workload. Just as the girl in the first play from “Kids Stuff," she displayed the story that she “misses out on all the fun around her so she can secure her future success”. She has the consciousness of getting good grade and “future success” when she was only in elementary school. It is true that being competitive will make kids more noticeable to employers , make kids have more advantages in their work. But this kind of education will make the children lost their childhood as they keep studying at the age they are supposed to be playing.
In general, the huge workload and the conception of competition give children some benefices such as they prepare well before they enter the society and they work harder by this motive power. However, children also lose the funny part in their childhood and the capacity to have fun. Knowing how to have fun is one of the crucial characteristics of a person because a person with this ability can find interesting things even though in a terrible circumstance and always keep a positive attitude in life. However, most people are eager to get success, thus they ignore this beneficial ability. Our children are not carefree, just as Knefel mentioned in “Kids Stuff”. They have different concerns for example, they want to “secure their future success” or to “stay out of jail”. But they are still kids, they still keep some of the “fun and hilarious and ridiculous and imaginative” parts in their heart. So we need to free them form the concerns that they are not supposed to have at their age, give them more spaces, and let them enjoy the childhood, as well as keep the ability to have fun.