Are kids today a little too grown-up?

By Jamie Corpuz
Sun managing editor

Kids these days are getting older and older. I’m sure one could argue that maybe I’ve just graduated from young adulthood to prudent old-lady having just turned 23, but I sincerely feel that “kids these days,” or rather their parents, are out of their mind!

When I was eleven I was only allowed to wear lip-gloss and hadn’t yet learned to pluck my eyebrows.
Growing up I was always jealous of Susie Such n’ Such who’s mother let her wear eye shadow, but now it’s common to see girls that same age decked out with black eyeliner, mascara, and even blush!

With young girls, it doesn’t stop there. I see mother’s taking their nine year old daughters out to get acrylics nails, 10 year olds getting waxed and ordering vanilla lattes, and have seen more 12 year old girls’ butt-cheek booty shorts then I’d ever thought to imagine!

With all the vices and bad habits the world today has to offer, do we really need to be starting kids off so young?

Gangs in Orange County haven’t really been a huge problem in comparison to other counties, but in the last year my work has had a serious problem with at least three different gangs of middle-school aged boys.

I don’t mean little punks being innocently obnoxious and looking for a place to skateboard.

I mean 12 year old boys stealing cigarettes and beer from AMPM, jacking tip jars from Starbucks, tagging up bathrooms, getting in brawls in the parking lots, and meeting by the dumpsters on their bicycles to sell each other drugs.

You have to wonder what mind-set has changed that allows for such behavior to occur. Have parents forgotten to screen the movies and games their kids watch and play?

Do Hollywood movies aim for too young of a demographic with their “tween” romances causing young girls to become more vain?

Or is it perhaps that society has lost a sense of community and adults are afraid to get involved with other people’s child rearing skills?

Had there been an old lady to cluck disapprovingly and shake her head, would that mother have been ashamed to bring her daughter in for a $35 beauty treatment?

If the barista at the local coffee shop had raised her eyebrow and offered an alternative on the kid’s menu, could she have spared that child a few more years of unnecessary consumerism and caffeine addiction?

If someone had seen little Johnny stealing a pack of cigarettes and grabbed him by the collar and made him call his mother or father to come pick him up and tell them what was going on, would we have so many kids acting out?

Obviously, there’s a line not to be crossed, but should people be so afraid of crossing it that kids and parents no longer face social consequences for bad judgment?

If you see kids bullying each other or getting in to trouble, will you be too afraid to do or say anything? Or will you take some kind of action to nip it in the bud for the betterment of the community you live in?

Because they’re not just somebody else’s kids, they are your present and future co-habitants.