The Prolonging of Adolescence In America we want our children to succeed. We want to give them every advantage that we can in order to help them overcome any obstacles we can in order to help with that success. Whether it is helping them to tie shoes into the teenage years, doing chores that as a parent, have been assigned to the child or even allowing the child to move back home after college, or even not leave after high school without any obligations such as having a job to pay for rent, buy food or pay utility bills without the prospect of going to college, we as parents are not necessarily making lives easier in the long run. In the essay “Spoiled Rotten: Why do kids rule the roost?” by Elizabeth Kolbert, she examines some different cultures and the habits of raising kids. One such culture is Matsigenka tribe in Peru. Members of the tribe go out to get new palm fronds for roofs of the huts they live in and bring along a 6 year old girl. This girl goes and does camp chores such as brushing off sleeping mats, stack leaves to bring back and even fished for crustaceans that she would clean, cook and serve to the adults in the group. According to the essay, this is quite a change from the families studied in Los Angeles, where the parents that were studied seemed to be searching for the approval of their children, rather than the other way around as in some other cultures. In the article “The Benefits of Spoiling Kids in America” by Lisa Belkin, suggests that we are only doing what is expected of us, unlike other animals such as Rhinos that rarely leave the side of their offspring until they are weaned, or panda bears that will sacrifice the well-being of one cub to help another cub. Belkin states that many for many animals, parenting is instinctual but for humans parenting is more centered on cultural expectations. Belkin proposes the acts of Spartan families leaving weak babies to die, the Japanese parents stressing conformity and the American families stressing individuality as the primary importance in growing up. Kolbert also tells of a woman who raised her daughter in France as an American, and the daughter was the only child her age that would act up in a restaurant; The French kids would sit quietly through a three course meal while Bean, the daughter being raised as an American, would throw a fit before the appetizers were served. This shows that while parents may have the best of intentions at heart, we may be doing more harm than good in raising our children.

Works Cited
Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Spoiled Rotten: Why do kids rule the roost?” The New Yorker.
2 July 2012. Web. 9 September 2012., 05-13-2013
Belkin, Lisa. “The Benefit of Spoiling Kids in America” The Huffington Post. 26 June 2012 Web, 05-13-2013