Maturing Teens Maturing Teens: Then and Now Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, children were put to work at a very young age. They cleaned, cooked, cared for the land their family owned, and also took care of other siblings in the household. These responsibilities pushed the children into maturing and growing up faster than expected. Robert Frost presents this theme in his poem "Out, Out—." In this poem he shows how young children are taking on the responsibilities of adults, which causes the teens to age earlier in life. By comparing the time back then and the time now, people will find that not only are the children growing and aging at a young age, but also that they are in two different ways. When Frost wrote this poem, it was around the time that not very many children went to school because they had to stay home and help their parents tend to the land so they could survive. In "Out, Out—", Frost presents a young boy who lives with his family in Vermont, and is expected to work their land just like a grown man would. At the beginning of the poem, the young boy is cutting wood with a saw. Frost says, "The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard and made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,…" In this statement Frost explains how the young boy cuts the wood, which is more like a job than a helpful chore. This wasn't unusual for the teens back than because as soon as they are old enough to work, they start working to help provide for their family. In order for these families to survive properly in their time, they had to have many children to enable them to have plenty of workers to work the land. If they didn't have children, or very little of them, their land wouldn't produce anything and therefore the family would not survive. Therefore, children were being produced for the sole purpose that as soon as they were of age, they would be put to work so that their own family and their future family would survive. The many responsibilities that the children were responsible for were usually tasks such as cutting wood, cooking, cleaning, and tending to any animals that the family may own. The boy in this poem has taken on so many responsibilities as a young child, that he is forced to mature into an older man in order to provide and keep his family alive.
Take note of how the father approached the mistakes made by his son. "I fouled up some screens once, You broke them out with a chair" I feel showed the negative feeling I got when I read the poem. That also makes me believe that it was an apprenticeship. To me parents even if they get upset at something you do, don't go about things in that matter. The son was trying to learn something from his father and rather than explaining and showing the son how to do it correctly or the mistakes he made the father destroys the work. ...
Fulfilling the roles of both mother and breadwinner creates an assortment of reactions for the narrator. In the poem’s opening lines, she commences her day in the harried role as a mother, and with “too much to do,” (2) expresses her struggle with balancing priorities. After saying goodbye to her children she rushes out the door, transitioning from both, one role to the next, as well as, one emotion to another. As the day continues, when reflecting on
Frost drains every bit of feeling he possibly can out of his poem. He makes the death of a little boy, whose candle burnt out much too quickly, seem uneventful to the people standing by, and there is no real sorrow behind the death of this innocent child. It’s almost as if Frost is saying “so what” if someone dies. Life, in “Out, Out --” has meaning only to the child who’s dying. It appears the other people in the poem have no emotion about the child’s death.
"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost is a poem about a young boy who dies as a result of cutting his hand using a saw. In order to give the reader a clear picture of this bizarre scenario, Frost utilizes imagery, personification, blank verse, and variation in sentence length to display various feelings and perceptions throughout the poem. Frost also makes a reference to Macbeth's speech in the play by Shakespear called Macbeth which is somewhat parallel to the occurrences in "Out, Out-."
Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.” This brilliant passage shows us how different children and adults are at the core. Children possess so much creativity at their young age. This creativity seems to go away in a lot of people as they get older. Adults tend to conform when they hit adulthood. They think and act very much alike. Older people don’t want to steer off the direction that others are going. Children are adventurers at the core while adults are conservatives at the
In a typical family, there are parents that expected to hear things when their teenager is rebelling against them: slamming the door, shouting at each other, and protests on what they could do or what they should not do. Their little baby is growing up, testing their wings of adulthood; they are not the small child that wanted their mommy to read a book to them or to kiss their hurts away and most probably, they are thinking that anything that their parents told them are certainly could not be right. The poem talks about a conflict between the author and her son when he was in his adolescence. In the first stanza, a misunderstanding about a math problem turns into a family argument that shows the classic rift between the generation of the parent and the teenager. Despite the misunderstandings between the parent and child, there is a loving bond between them. The imagery, contrasting tones, connotative diction, and symbolism in the poem reflect these two sides of the relationship.
In “The Farmer’s Children,” Elizabeth Bishop uses different literary techniques to portray her theme. “The Farmer’s Children” tells the story of two young brothers, Cato and Emerson, who have to sleep in the cold in their father’s barn in order to protect the tools inside. These brothers also have to endure parental neglect from their stepmother and father which causes them to freeze to death in the barn. One technique that is used by Bishop is the characterization of the parents. In addition, Bishop uses an allusion, which is a reference to a work of art in another work of art, and symbolism to further show how the characterization of the parents affected the two brothers. In “The Farmer’s Children,” Bishop uses the characterization of the parents of Cato and Emerson, the allusion to “Hansel and Grethel,” and the symbolism of the stepmother’s snowflake quilt to portray the theme of how parental neglect can lead to negative consequences.
In the poem Birches by Robert Frost, Frost portrays the images of a child growing to adulthood through the symbolism of aging birch trees. Through these images readers are able to see the reality of the real world compared to their carefree childhood. The image of life through tribulation is the main focal point of the poem and the second point of the poem is if one could revert back to the simpler times of childhood. The language of the poem is entirely arranged through images, although it contains some diction it lacks sound devices, metaphors, and similes compared to other published works by Frost.
In the critical incident described above, the main culture to take into consideration is the culture of adolescence. During the transitional period between childhood and adulthood, known as adolescence, many vital milestones must be met in order to ensure academic and personal success and wellbeing. Morbidity data allows for assessment of many conditions and non-fatal diseases that develop during adolescence. The top five causes of morbidity in adolescence between the ages of 10-14 include; unipolar depressive disorder, iron deficiency anemia, asthma, back pain, and anxiety disorders. Mortality rates of adolescence have been shown to decline in the past decade. The leading causes of death among the adolescent age group include; road injuries, suicide, lower respiratory infections, HIV, and interpersonal violence. It is estimated that 1.3 million adolescents died in 2012, and the mortality rate is 111 per 100,000. In regards to poverty, there are currently nine million adolescents who live in low-income households and there are four million adolescents who live in households that are at or below the federal poverty level (Adolescent health epidemiology, 2017).
Chapter 9 is all about the process of adolescence developed in the children’s life. The chapter explained how the puberty starts, how the changes in body and mind developed according to the sex in puberty, how the children faced some barriers during early and late maturation, how some of the eating disorders occurred, how puberty connected with the formal operational thoughts (Intuitive and Analytic thought), in what way the brain developed in stage of puberty, and how do middle schools provide knowledge about adolescence. In my case, I started my puberty from the age of 14. As the chapter talks that genetic factor also plays role in puberty. For example, my mom told me that she reached puberty at age 14 which lead me to pass through same age
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence. Right away in the first lines of the poem we learn through the child narrator that his life is about to change dramatically for the worse.
Adolescence, according to Hall (1916), is a period that begins at puberty for about 12 to 13 years, and it ends late at 22 years to 25 years of age. He also describes this period as a period of "sturm und drung" which means "storm and stress". The period of sturm und drung in German literature includes the masterpiece of schiller and the writings of Goethe. This literary movement is full of idealism, expression of personal feelings, enthusiasm and distress.
This is supported in the theme which states that children should not be in such a rush to grow up because the outside world can be a cruel place. For example, “the dogs don’t hate [them], merely want to / taste the cider of [their] blood, watch [their] / fur drift lazily toward October clouds / where geese infuriate them” (11-14). This is a supporting text because it shows that children won’t always be treated fairly and if they are in such a rush to grow up, they could face many problems early in life because they can feel as though they do not belong anywhere. Also, this quotation is descriptive and works well in that it allowed me to paint a picture of how other people could perceive children as helpless and a form of easy bait. To them, children are not just other humans; they are a source of adventure and game. Furthermore, it says “better that you hop directly back / demand your cage…” (7-8), which maintains that if the children are not protected and sheltered by their parents, their fate could become as bad as what is described above; they could live a life in which the end of the negative path seems endless. It is saying that the one place a child can feel safe is in or at his/her house where he/she has “… cedar chips, the water bottle full / and dripping next to wilted greens…” (8-9). It may not be the first place a child would want to go back to when he/she is in trouble but the option will always there. This house is the child’s safe haven and protection from the outside world; a place to feel safe, protected, and nourished. For example, the “…children bring you apples. / They’ll rub your fur and bring / another and another” (19-21). This text shows that no matter what happens the parents will be there to show care and love for their children without asking any questions. I like how the author worded the three quotes from above.
In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge laments how he was ‘reared / In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim’ (LB 242.51-2). He goes on to promise Hartley, his sleeping son, that the boy will be a ‘true child of nature’ (68.171) and experience a better life growing up in the Lake District, where he can ‘wander like a breeze’ (243.54). This simile suggests both the child’s unity with nature, and a boundless sense of freedom, also captured in Wordsworth’s poetry; ‘I wondered lonely as a cloud’ (LB 188.1). This simple view of childhood as idyllic innocence and connection to nature remains uninterrupted throughout ‘Frost at Midnight’; ‘all seasons’ will be ‘sweet’ for the boy (243.65) and the cyclical structure of the poem, beginning with the ‘secret ministry of the frost’ (242.1) and ending with the same image, suggests a permanence and regularity for a life begun in natural surroundings. There is no faltering of the connection to nature, as Wordsworth experiences in The Prelude. Moreover, Coleridge seems to treat the setting of nature – ‘sea, hill and wood’ (242.11) as the perfect medium to grow up meditating on the ‘numberless goings of life’ (242.12). In this poem, the child’s upbringing in Cumberland is blissfully uncomplicated, and his natural surroundings give him
Teenagers constantly worry about their body image. Magazines, newspapers, and television don’t exactly help to boost their confidence. The portrayal of stick thin woman and body building men forces teens to believe they need to achieve that “perfect” body and look. The biggest issue of these images being broadcasted to teens is the effects that the images have on them. Teenagers who obsess over their body image can experience stress due to trying to impress others, develop an eating disorder, and neglect, and even jeopardize, important aspects of their lives when they focus too much on their body image.