Girls, Interrupted: Children Pay a Price

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Girls, Interrupted: Children Pay a Price When Childhood Ends Too Soon By Caitlin Flanagan Reviewed by Elizabeth Hill 11/10/11 News Analysis Essay Psychology 2618 – Psychology of Women Fall 2011 Dr. Stern The carefree days of being a little girl can get complicated once she starts to menstruate, a stage of puberty to becoming a woman. This process for a young woman carries with it much more difficulties and responsibilities than when a young man enters the puberty stage of his life. It can be a confusing, stressful and scary time for a young woman if she is not prepared properly for menstruation and puberty. The risk of getting pregnant increases once a young woman starts her period, not to mention the amount of different hormones affecting her psychological, physical and sexual well being. In Time Magazine article, “Girls, Interrupted: Children Pay a Price When Childhood Ends Too Soon” written by Caitlin Flanagan, she addresses the concern for girls reaching puberty at an earlier age. In summary, Flanagan believes, “it’s cruel to expect adolescents to make the change from girl to woman without any special protections against the corrosive forces of the world, without sufficient time and privacy to work out the big questions of their lives” (Flanagan, 2011, p. 60). In a healthy father and daughter relationship, a young girl looks to her father as her protector, hero and Prince Charming. A little girl from the age 4-12 doesn’t think on sexual terms but more on fairytale fantasies when comparing the man she hopes to marry someday is similar to her own father. According to Freud, in the psychoanalytic theory, a girl’s sexual attraction to and intense love for her father is called the Electra complex (Hyde, 2007, p. 33). A little girl, pretending to be a princess as seen in the Disney movies, she fantasies being carried away by the
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