Has Childhood Changed

Has Childhood Changed?

By Charve' Brown

The purpose of this assignment is to examine if childhood has changed in the past 40 to 50 years. For the assignment I interviewed a 9 year old African American female and a 54 year old African American female. During my interview I found out that childhood has changed tremendously. Morals and values have been subsided due to priorities. Then on the contrary stress has taken a dramatic rise due to more children being raised in a single-parent home. In this paper I covered these basic areas: family history, school, friends, and extra-curricular activities.

When I asked the 9 year old (Trinity) to tell me about her family she started out with "I have a dad, a mom, and a grandmother." Then I asked her did she live with all those people? Trinity said, "well, no I live with my mom and grandmother, but my daddy comes to see me every week and sometimes at school during the week." We kept the conversation going in that direction and I asked her to tell me about her school. Trinity loved school even though she was teased a lot because she did not have a "complete" family. Her school was a big school in the city where diversity was no issue. Even the classes were well distributed with students of all kinds. Trinity however, had a small group of friends that she liked. She did not really try to fit in with a lot of the other kids because she said everyone teased her. She worried sometimes about the things people said about her and her father (Joshua). Especially considering that she absolutely loved her father. Once she even hit a girl at school and that just happened to be a day that her father came to eat lunch with her. She said she told him that the girl was picking on her. She said her daddy told her to tell someone what was going on next time and not try to handle it by herself. "Good girls don't fight, T (that's what her father called her for short)" was what she remembered him say. Then she started to drift back into her family a bit.

She said she always enjoyed her time with her father. She especially enjoyed when he came over to their house and played games with her and helped her with her homework. Joshua spent a lot of time with Trinity. To my surprise Trinity did not talk a lot about her mother. Seeing in which that was the parent that she lived with and shared the same sex with, I thought she would talk about her more. Then as our conversation continued I discovered the answer to my question. Joshua had been to see Trinity that day at school. She said that she can't talk to her mommy about her daddy because mommy would get upset. Then to digress from family for a while (but I was sure that we would eventually venture back there) I asked her did she like sports? Trinity loves to play basketball and she was fast like a butterfly (as she so eloquently put it). Her father would take her to the gym with him when he worked out and her and her cousin would play basketball. She also loved to go play putt putt golf. And to my surprise guess who always took her to play putt putt golf? That's right her father. In my conclusion to Trinity's story I would say that the balance in her stressful unbalanced life would be her father. When I asked her about her grades she said she makes okay grades but sometimes when she misses her daddy she doesn't do so well. Let's move back 45 year ahead of today and see how childhood was then.

I interviewed my mother for my second person. Linda is a 54 year old African American female. When my mother described her childhood it sounded like this. Well, in my family there were my four brothers, my two sisters, and my mother. My father left us when I was a little girl. In school she was a popular and very outspoken individual. That was until her senior year. She dropped out of school to help her mother take care of her brothers and sisters so all of them would not have to drop out of school. That was one