Shakespeare’s Juliet was 13, unready for love perhaps but, by the standards of her age, more than ready for marriage. Tom Sawyer is thought to have been 13 when he got “engaged” to Becky Thatcher. For some it is an age of prodigy: Anne Frank received her diary as a present on her 13th birthday; Bobby Fischer was 13 when he became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Chess Championship–within two years he was an international grand master. Ask 13-year-olds what they want for their birthday, and the answers range from a kitten to an iPhone to getting their nose pierced. 13-year-olds demand more respect from their parents and show them less. Every teenager says it is harder today than it was for their parents. Has any generation ever thought otherwise? Each generation has to face new dimensions in the world which bring new anxieties. Are kids growing up too fast?  What does that mean, exactly? As late as 1708 in Britain, a child of  age 7 could be hanged for stealing, and some of the most dangerous factory jobs could be performed only by children because of their smaller size. The biggest year for teenage births in U.S. history was 1957, because many brides were teenagers.

 Each generation has a story to tell. Parents are worried about kids growing up faster, and that is physiologically true: 13-year-olds are more mature physically than they were a generation ago. Boys are reaching their adult heights at younger ages, which suggests that they are maturing earlier. Teens are growing up in a culture that sexualizes children and immerses them in adult images. What messages are 13-year-olds getting from the magazine media, music, movies and television?  What messages are they getting from their parents? 

“Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary in 1944. “Ultimately people shape their own characters.”