Stop Acting Like An Adult

Many kids have to grow up early. Many kids who are doing adult things they shouldn’t even be considering. Sadly, we live in a world of brokenness. Many kids are forced to grow up. When these kids are running around doing adult things, other adults forget that they are kids.

I recently watched “The Proposal” for the first time in years. When it came out I was thirteen. I watched this movie so much that more money was spent renting it from a movie store than what the actual DVD cost if bought. I thought I knew so much in life at this time. When I watched this movie the other day as an adult, it showed me how young I was. So many things that went over my head. Not even bad things per se, but for example, the vocabulary was advanced for me at the age of thirteen.

All kids, forced or not forced to grow up, want to be adults. I feel like more now than ever. I didn’t feel like a child until I reached the part in my life where I became an adult and saw how young I was. Which that time wasn’t until around a year ago when I turned twenty-four. I will admit, because of being forced to grow up in extreme ways, I was and still probably delayed more than others. Then again, twenty-four is about the age that someone’s brain is fully developed.

I watched a mini-series on Hulu called, “A Teacher.” It highlights a teacher having a romantic relationship with her high-school student. Though I can’t fully relate, parts throughout the series I felt. Especially, the end scene of the entire show. They go ten years in the future after the situation happened. I will insert a video of the scene (in which there is some language), but one line that hit me hard was said by the boy, “I saw my brother the other day. He’s seventeen now. The same age I was. He looked so fucking young. I was just a kid.”

There are times where I have looked at pictures of myself during times when adult things happened to me. Most things that have happened to me were uncontrollable. One situation was an adult treating me in ways that never should have happened. I looked at a picture from when I was only a couple of months after turning nineteen. Not too far before that situation happened. I looked so young. I had braces, which made me look even younger. When I look back, it makes me sick to my stomach. I was still a kid.

It’s inevitable for kids to act like adults, especially in a world full of brokenness. I’m not going to deny that. After reaching a level of maturity, it showed me how important it is to treat kids like kids. At times I was treated like a kid. A lot of the time I was not. The number of things that could have gone differently if I had an adult treat me as a kid in the ways I needed. I was unable to communicate that since I didn’t fully understand what was needed for myself.

This is a reason why in the future I can see myself fostering or even adopting. The kids in the system are being forced to do adult things, and some of those things they will probably carry for the rest of their lives. There are also many things I could lift off their shoulders that they don’t need to be worrying about at the age they are.

There are many mature children with or without trauma but are still a child. So many adults in this world forget and take advantage of that.