Literature Review 5

    David Elkind, professor in Tufts University, is well known for his groundbreaking works on the dangers of "pushing down" during early childhood education. He states that teachers and parents could disrupt the education of children and distort their development of learning. He is well connected with the decline of social markers. His book, All Grown Up and No Place to Go, is about the pressures that society places on teenagers encouraging them to grow up into early adulthood. This leads to self disruptive behavior that has set the pattern of rushing into adulthood for the current day generation.
    On the subject of teenagers being pushed into the adult culture, Elkind states, With so many sexually active adolescents, with so many young people experimenting with alcohol and other drugs, the perception of teenage immaturity had to be abandoned” (Elkind 6). During the sexual revolution, the idea of what was acceptable and what wasn't changed drastically. Teenagers began to experiment with drugs and alcohol because it became the adult thing to do. Aside from that, sexual experimentation also became acceptable and even encouraged by the media. Teenagers slowly began to be pushed into the adult life, leaving their innocence behind. They were introduced to sex-education courses in high school which made them more aware of their nature. "Thanks in large part to television, films, magazines, and music lyrics, even young children are witness to brutality, violence, an sexuality on a scale that would have been unimaginable five or six decades ago"(Elkind 8). He goes on to say that "By the time they are adolescents, therefore, most contemporary teenagers have already been exposed to more violent and seamier sides of life than their parents and grandparents had seen or heard of in a lifetime" (Elkind 8). This concept of exposure being the utmost amount of information compared to those older (parents and grandparents) is generally very interesting. I like the idea that the youth will continuously know more and probably try more than the older generations have. This idea kicked off the pattern of ongoing experimentation that we see today. The exposure of adult content was geared toward teenagers, specifically though "soaps" and "soft porn". This rushed teenagers into young adulthood that normally deserved more time for transitioning. He describes this concept of teenagers being pushed into young adulthood and ripped away of their innocence.
This material, although dealing with teenagers as opposed to college students, connects to my research because it described the root of this pattern of society's influence on labels of age groups. Society played a key role with the teenagers after the 1960's. It forced them into young adulthood, but then current day society had been delaying the transition into adulthood from this state of young adulthood. These young adults are stuck in somewhat of a limbo between the two stages of maturity.

Elkind, David. All Grown Up and No Place to Go. Massachusetts. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
        Print.