Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

The status of today’s childhood is without a doubt different than that of the past. Now-a-days our youth don’t act very young anymore. They are more involved with activities of an older age group. In other words, childhood is a generation ahead of what it use to be. This doesn’t come to much of a surprise with older folks reiterating the phrases such as “back in my day we didn’t have that.” But in our time now you can’t help but to notice that things are very different.

For example, I got my first cellphone back when I was a freshmen or sophomore in high school. Now people are getting cellphones at earlier ages. Other changes I also notice is the quality or content of TV shows. The channels I use to watch when I was younger are broadcasting shows that are more mature. The same goes for the movies that are geared toward children. I remember a while back when my little cousin was about 6 or 7 and we were watching the movie Madagascar and this part of the movie came on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=repLtBaR7mo. First I was shocked to see that in the movie and even more shocked that we were laughing at the same thing. I was also surprised to see the way they used “catnip” in this scene from the movie Shrek 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvO3_orG_mg.

To sum it all up in a nutshell the status of childhood today has a lot of variability. Today’s childhood is doing more than what was expected of older generations. It is almost safe to say that it will continue to change with each childhood being a generation ahead of its predecessor.