"Today's child has become the unwilling, unintended victim of overwhelming stress- the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social change and constantly rising expectations" (Elkind 2001).

At Early Life Foundations we are committed to ensuring that children are entitled to a childhood that provides optimal opportunities for the development and acquisition of healthy and positive self esteem, identity and resilience. Part of helping that to occur for all children is to assist and support parents with their parenting and to provide practical strategies as well as comment, discussion and debate about childhood.

The article in The Melbourne Herald Sun this week about a beauty pageant for young children between birth and 8 years is just another example in a long seemingly relentless series of examples of inappropriate and misguided activities for families and children.

We thought that our editorial this term should focus upon and remind educators, parents, and all adults of some of the important issues we need to reflect upon and be careful of for all children.

It seems many of us are increasingly caught up in a rushed and hurried society. We rush to work, we rush home. We rush our children from activity to activity; we urge them to gain certain reading levels at certain points along the education path. We are in a rush to get everything right, as soon as we can. Everything has "sped up" and the world around us is moving at a frighteningly fast speed. It seems the world and contemporary life is rushing so quickly and despite our best intentions, our expectations of children have increased so much that our view of childhood has shifted considerably and not necessarily for the better.

 Australia is now one of the world's hardest working countries with many of us working longer and longer hours with less and less time for recreation and rest. The predictions of thirty years ago, that Australia would become a country of great leisure and recreation time with fewer working hours has proven to be far from the current reality.

 Society itself is in a stage where we measure success by early achievement, we extol the virtues of people who achieve early in life or at a young age and yet success itself is often misinterpreted. We are working and living in a society which often sends us confused messages about what is important, how to succeed, what success actually is and how we measure it.

 Even teachers of children in their first year of school often make the comment in relation to the increasing pressures on young children in this beginning period of the school life.

 "We don't have time to let them play, or to have much free time, we have such a crowded and pushed down curriculum. It's a lot more stressful on the kids and us these days."

 Even the issue of homework seems to have escalated out of all proportion. Cathy Sherry in the Age 10 March 2001wrote an article headed, Homework Ate My Childhood.  In the article, she described nagging at her prep aged child for not "doing her homework" and lamented the fact that instead of yelling at her 6 year old, they could have been having a lovely time playing out in the backyard together and how much more learning may have eventuated and what a valuable time that would have been.

 "There is nothing original in questioning the emphasis on homework and testing in Australian schools today, but I want to add my voice to the chorus of protest before I am brainwashed by the system.  I want to say that I don't like the current school culture of relentless academic achievement. When I look at my daughters' homework, I feel sad that so many hours of her time and mine will be wasted over the next 10 years. Hours that she would otherwise spend dancing with her sisters, building homes for her caterpillars or writing with her sparkly pens. Activities that will develop her mind and which she only has limited amount of time - her childhood - to do" (Sherry, 2001).

The issues of homework and what it means, its purpose and level of importance are issues that cause great controversy in education and amongst teachers and parents.

We also receive many messages from our community that say, "to be successful", to be "the best" we must start earlier and earlier, we must get our children ready earlier, we must ensure that we provide children with everything we possibly can before they even start school.  In the USA the term "overscheduled child" has been given to this notion of providing every opportunity to children. This takes the shape of some children, even as young as three years old, being taken to a gym lesson, a swimming lesson, a music class and preschool or child care in the same week.  Many of these extra curricula activities are advertised in such a way that it sounds as if somehow children will be "missing out" on the chance or skill of a life time if they do not attend all of these programs in their early childhood. Parents often report feeling "guilty" if they resist some of this "hard sell", or they worry that perhaps other children will have the extra edge on their children if they have attended particular or additional programs to their own children.  

Children who are scheduled into too many activities each week may inadvertently be learning that life is about having every moment of their lives filled with entertainment and prescribed activities. Consequently, opportunities to show initiative, to play alone and create experiences for themselves in some cases appear to have become lost. Teachers are even reporting that children in their early childhood programs are no longer actually initiating their own creative play.

Successful lifelong learning is about showing initiative, making decisions and choices and thinking laterally and creatively. Parents need to realise they are not failing their children if their young ones are not enrolled in lots of activities each week.

Time to play out in the backyard or local park, time to create things at home, to entertain oneself, to turn an old cardboard box into a bus or train and to use imagination is something precious and for some children in our community, in danger of disappearing.

 Another trend in recent years is where the media and advertising often perpetuate the notion that it is "cool" to be grown up and to look like a teenager (even when you are not). Some department stores currently advertise and sell a "padded bra" for girls as young five and six. Horrifyingly, a G string can be bought for two year olds now via the internet and some clothing stores.

Phillip Adams in one of his regular articles in the Australian discussed this in an article he called, Paedophilia Inc (June 21 2003). He states:

 "I'm talking about the billions of dollars of marketing aimed at kids whose childhoods are being cynically abbreviated, stolen for profit. I'm talking about the sexualisation of ever younger children through advertising and for what passes for entertainment- so that kids are encouraged to see themselves as sexual beings, long long before puberty. The use of young 13 and 14 year old girls as high fashion models in glossy magazines. A child should be allowed to be a child for as long as possible."

The media image of representing a child as a teenager or dressing young pubescent children as sexual models to advertise clothes pushes us further and further away from the notion that childhood is a specific and important period in the lifespan.

 We need to be careful when a society starts to blur the edges between what is appropriate for an adult, who is able to make an informed choice about their image and lifestyle, and a child, who is in no position to make such decisions. We also need to be careful that as we oppose issues such as paedophilia we do not paradoxically begin to condone young children being viewed in any way as an adult by allowing sexually inappropriate clothing to be provided for children.

Advertising and marketing of products appears to also blur the line between childhood and adulthood.  Recently in a parent magazine an advertisement was run that showed an exercise bike that was marketed for children as young as 4 years of age. The advertisement included a list of features of the bike which included, "a calorie counter"!  Why would a four year old need a calorie counter? Surely, with the increase in anorexia and eating disorders and the continued messages for young girls and women about weight and body image being tied to "success" or desirability, we need to be careful not to buy into that message for children at any age. Young children do not need to be given a message of 'watch your weight", or using a calorie counter on an exercise bike!!!

 The community needs to provide a message of healthy eating and exercise but it is not appropriate for a young child to be counting calories at the ripe old age of four.

 Many parents feel pressured into spending money they may not really be able to afford for programs that are not necessarily going to make a significant difference to the child's learning or later life experiences.  It is important for parents not to feel pressured to enrol their children into everything that is on offer and not to feel guilty or pressured by others or by advertising that seems to sometimes suggest that you will be letting your child down if they don't attend.

 As a society, we need to stop using children as a means for marketing and making money.  We need to stop over scheduling childrens' lives and start re defining childhood as a time for the richness of play, relationships and an unhurried lifestyle.

Excerpts from two of Kathy's books "What's the Hurry" and "Parenting" have been used in this editorial.