For more than a quarter century, child psychologist David Elkind has been writing insightful, bestselling studies that probe the minds and hearts of young people and the adults who are supposed to care for them. Elkind made a major splash in 1981 with his acclaimed The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, which was reissued last year in a 25th-anniversary edition. His work continued with 1987’s Miseducation, 1988’s All Grown Up and No Place to Go and 1994’s Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance. His latest book, The Power of Play, was published this year. Elkind, a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and president emeritus for the National Association for the Education of Young Children, has been an outspoken critic of accepted methods of parenting and educating young people.

We asked youth worker Ron Jackson to interview Elkind about the current state of adolescent life.

YouthWorker Journal: Let’s start with some definitions. How do you define child­hood, adolescence and adulthood; and what is the best way for young people to move from childhood to adulthood?

DAVID ELKIND: There are many ways to talk about this. There are physi­cal changes that happen quickly in early childhood and then move slower in ele­mentary school before the rapid growth during early adolescence. Then there are the intellectual changes. Kids develop reason at the age of 6 or 7. This enables them to operate according to rule. Then in adolescence they get a new range of reason that allows them to think abstract­ly. In emotional development, their emo­tions become much more differentiated and deeper as they get older. All of these things are happening at the same time.

YWJ: In 1981 you wrote in The Hurried Child that “children are forced to take on the physical, psychological and social trap­pings of adulthood before they are prepared to deal with them.” How have things changed since you wrote these words?

ELKIND: By “hurried child” I mean a child who is expected to feel and think and behave as much older that he or she is developmentally. And, unfortunately, things have not gotten much better.

One of the things that is the most deplorable is a lot of the hurrying that I was talking about with respect to preschool children and school-age chil­dren; and adolescence has shifted down now to infancy with things like “Baby Einstein,” “Athletic Baby,” “Prenatal University” and so on. Recent studies have shown that parents now allow even three­month-olds to watch television because they think it is good for their brains.

So, unfortunately, the hurrying has gone further. The National Academy of Pediatrics has issued a number of reports about the dangers of all this.

Also, childhood has moved much more indoors with the prominence of television, computer games and comput­ers. Children are spending 10 to 12 fewer hours out of doors every week than they were just a decade or two ago. In general, children are less active and more sedentary than they were in the past.

This has implications for obesity, type II diabetes and declining measures of physi­cal strength and ability. So our children are falling behind. This may be the first generation of children who are less healthy than their parents. We really are in danger of falling way behind other countries.

The one positive thing has been the growth of computers in education. This will hopefully change education and make it a more level playing field, as it allows children to be much more active in their own learning.

YWJ: What effects do you feel technology and pop culture are having on adolescent identity formation?

ELKIND: This is complicated, and it is so new that we don’t have a lot of research. On the positive side, social-net­working sites like MySpace enable kids to adopt alternate identities and try them out in many ways they were not able to try out before. I think that’s a positive thing. It gives them more options to try many more things without exposing themselves to possible ridicule because no one knows who they are.

On the other hand, when they take on these roles, they are not taking responsi­bility for the roles. In my day, if you were going to dress up as a hippie or dye your hair pink, there would be consequences for your choices. But today, kids try out some of these identities on the Internet, usually incognito, which means they are not taking responsibility for their choices.

Technology is not bad or good. It is simply how we use it. We have to realize the kids have access to all kinds of infor­mation, so education is taking place in many other places besides the classroom. But there is information overload from so many directions, and the question is whether multi-tasking is really that ben­eficial. Some kids need the ability to con­centrate on a single task.

I am optimistic about where technology is going because I think educational reform has not worked, but hopefully technology will bring a positive revolution in education.

YWJ : You have criticized schools for adding to the pressures on hurried children. What role do you see churches playing in this process?

ELKIND: I think churches are playing an increasingly important role because, in many senses, computers, along with cell phones and other types of technologies, are in many ways isolating. We are social beings. We need community. We need social interaction. Church—and, in particu­lar, youth work—is one of those places that still can provide community. I think this is a very healthy balance to the increasingly isolating factors of technology.

And the church can be a moralizing force, helping kids make decisions about what is appropriate. So much of the nudity and swearing in our culture is simply unnecessary. Attention is the cur­rency in pop culture today, and one of the ways to get attention is to get more and more lewd and lascivious. I think this is unfortunate. Religion can provide a mor­alizing center. Repression is a healthy thing, in moderation. And I think we are not doing enough in repressing instincts, repressing desires and impulses that may be socially unacceptable or inappropriate. So the religious community can help kids have a more balanced view of these things, without going to the extreme of writing off everybody that is different from them.

YWJ: Was there an adult who made a major impact on your life?

ELKIND: My father. My father was a very religious man and an honest person. He was very self-sacrificing; he worked hard to give us a better life, and he never expected anything in return. His example of honesty and devotion was very personal— he never imposed that on us. He set the example, and we followed it. If I had to have a mentor, if would be my father.

YWJ : Is there anything specific you can tell those who work with young people about helping them manage the stress in their lives?

ELKIND: Kids are under a lot of stress. One of the ways is to share about our own youth and the kinds of experiences we’ve had in our working lives. I think once we share with them, they are more willing to share with us. Sharing is one of the healthiest things we can do in reducing stress, because, often, stress comes from simply bottling things up. So sharing can be a healthy thing if it is done with consideration.

I also think humor is a healthy thing. For kids, it is good ventilation. The use of humor can be therapeutic. Humor helps us to get distance. It helps us to not take ourselves too seriously. Using humor with adolescents, I think, is very power­ful. You have to be thoughtful about it, as there are some things that are serious and should not be made fun of—we should not be destructive with humor. But humor can help lighten the load, so to speak. So humor and shared experiences are two of the ways we can help people with their stress.

YWJ: In The Power of Play, you wrote, “Over the past two decades, children have lost twelve hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities.” Why is play so important, and how can we reclaim this unstructured time?

ELKIND: Play is our creative impulse, our need to adapt the world to ourselves; and we all need to do that. Just as we need to assimilate food, translating and trans­forming it into nutrients for our bodies, we must adapt the world through play.

Another function of play is to create new learning experiences. Children play, and they create new learning experiences they could not have in any other way. When preschool children play, they are learning about taking turns; but they are also learning about whether they are a leader or a follower, whether they are fast or slow, whether they are athletic or not. They are learning a lot about themselves through the self-created experi­ences in play.

School-age children, when they are playing board games, learn strategies; they learn to observe the other person’s facial expression, body language and so on. These kinds of things they can’t learn playing a computer game. Through their own play, adolescents also create there own learning experiences. Even when the experiences are negative—for example, when they are being teased—the person who is being teased learns something; and the person who is doing the teasing learns something. So play is always the creation of new experiences through activities. There are many things children and ado­lescents can never learn unless they themselves are involved in the creation of those activities.

This is why the self-created activities are so important. This is also why chil­dren who are over-programmed—so busy in one organized activity after another— don’t have the time to engage and create those new rules.

I believe one of the reasons we see so much bullying and other kinds of nega­tive activities at school today is that kids have not had enough of these self-created experiences to develop the social skills they need to relate to one another. I hap­pen to think that binge drinking in col­lege is another way. These kids have not had enough learning experiences with each other to know how to relate socially with one another. Binge drinking can be a way of relating, because you don’t know how else to do it.

When we deprive them of that oppor­tunity in adolescence, then they miss some very powerful learning experiences they need for success in the adult world. I cannot make that point strongly enough. Many parents have done a good job, and their kids do play well. These are the healthy ones. But the proportion of kids who are unhealthy is getting to be greater than the proportion of those who are healthy, and that is the scary part.

One of the things I hear from parents when I talk to them about play is, “Well, we just don’t have time for that.” They think that in our busy world, play is a waste of time. This is a myth. Play is a basic human disposition, along with love and work; and you cannot cut it out. Children are going to play, and attempt­ing to limit the amount of time to just a few minutes or attempting to cut it out completely is deplorable.

Kids play! This is what they do! It is a need, just as they have a need to work. It is a healthy need and an important need. It can be abused and misused, but so can love and work. Play is an essential part of what it means to be a human being. And to the extent that we eliminate it is to the extent that we become more narrow people.

YWJ: Is there anything else you would like to say to our readers?

ELKIND: I have worked with youth workers in the past, and I really welcome the work that they are doing. It is so important. I think young people have so many other influences on them today that having youth workers gives them a posi­tive balance. I just want to compliment them on their work and tell them to keep doing it. It can sometimes be a tough job; but they must realize how important their role is, particularly today.

_____________

An ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene, Ron Jackson is a veteran youth pastor and children’s pastor. He now serves as the pastor to college students at College Church of the Nazarene on the campus of MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas.