Children are born with behavioral patterns that come as standard, certain skills that are encoded in their genes. However, these latent skills, if not activated at an early age, remain permanently deactivated. In that sense, the child is born wild, and if adequate education and social context, the boy is trapped in an aberrant wild state.
In other words, the child is not an adult, and should be treated like a child. If we do the opposite, we may be incurring a adultification bias.
Adultification and its adult antithesis
A good book on the topic of adultification is The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups, of Erika Christakis. She uses adultification as the inability to see the world from a child's perspective.
Paradoxically, we are also treating children as adults in some matters, as helpless in others, and, on top of that, demanding that women look more like children.
This study talks about this by examining the “adultification” of girls and the “youthfulness” of women in magazines, in which girls “dress up” to look like women and women “dress down” to look like girls. .
The analysis included a total of 540 advertising and editorial images from American women's, men's, and teen magazines. The results show that adultification prevails more than youth, that youth prevails equally in magazines for men and women, that girls who are adulted are more likely to dress provocatively and exhibit sexy facial expressions, and that advertising and editorial images are equally likely to appear adultified and youthful.
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The news
Adultification: the bias of treating children in an increasingly adult way
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.