Also, he does not want other children to ‘grow up’. This is presented through his misinterpretation of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ poem. He says that he wants to ‘catch’ children who ‘start to go off the cliff’, when the poem is actually about the sex. Holden can’t move on from childhood and can’t change his innocent mindset. Holden distains adulthood because of its superficiality and ‘phoniness’.
However, this innocence means that children are seen as vulnerable and in need of protection from dangers of the adult world and so they must be kept quarantined and separated from it. As a result, children’s lives are lived largely in the sphere of the family and education, where adults provide for them from and protect them from the outside world. Similarly, unlike adults, they lead lives of leisure and play and are largely excluded from paid work. There are many cross-cultural differences in childhood. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict argues that children from more simpler and non-industrial societies are generally treated differently from there modern western
This example shows you that his mind hasn’t yet fully developed to understand the consequences brought to him by his actions. It’s in this philosophy that I believe juveniles should not be tried as adults. A child’s immaturity is his most dangerous trait. Many children lack the ability to rationalize a stressful situation. Adults have a hard time making the right judgment calls, imagine the mindset of an emotional immature child?
I don’t steal because I don’t want to be stolen. I obey laws in expectation of others thinking and doing the same. I have been taught by my parents that it is basically bad to break the law. I feel like if I don’t obey the law in way that I would disappoint them and never hear the end of it from my parents. “Speeding may seem to be a harmless offense at first glance.
For the crimes teens commit, they should not go unpunished, but to treat teens as adults is not the fair thing to do when teens don’t have the same judgment as adults. This poor judgment might also come from lack of positive influences. Many teens make the bad decisions that they do because they don’t have anyone in their lives telling them right from wrong. Without these people, teens might act out not realizing what consequences come from their actions. In the Lord of the Flies, there
This echoes one of the themes of this novel—adolescent confusion on the way to the adult world and the pain of growing up. As what Holden did before, he alienated himself from the outside phony world so as to protect the inner fragile, confused self. He labelled people around him as phonies and morons but it never downed on him that he was also one of the phonies who would flatter someone on mouth but curse him in heart. He didn’t know what he wanted to get from the adult
Through Holden’s eyes we see the flawed and phony side to the world, in contrast to the innocent and pure depiction of children. The representation of adults in the book is of ‘phoniness’, because Holden perceives the behaviours of the world at large to be fake and superficial; phoniness is Holden’s phrase to describe this. On the other hand, children in the book are portrayed in a very innocent, carefree light, illustrating Holden’s perception of their good and true purity. This difference between childhood and the rest of the world is shown by his love of children such as his younger siblings compared to adults who he relates to phoniness. It is shown in the way Holden remembers those people of his childhood compared to those he knows in the adult society, such as Sally Hayes.
The question really is why the parents would be held responsible for the crimes or actions of their children. People who disagree with me will say that since the parents are responsible for the child that they are responsible for the child’s actions. What I say to that is, parents should not be held responsible for their children’s actions and/or crimes because the parents cannot control every decision of their minor children. A parent can teach a child to do the right thing but that does not mean the child will always do the right thing. A parent cannot control everything that their child does.
Do our Children need Protecting? If we try to protect our children from the world, then they will never be able to be part of the world. We cannot expect our children to be able to learn from our violent mistakes if we shelter them from the mistakes of the world. In a poem written by Billy Collins he discusses this subject. Are our children too innocent to know about the world?
I think that this pessimism of his is a way to protect himself from his own weaknesses, and that he do this partly so that he can forget how boring and unfair the adult life can be, easily said he does not wont to grow up because he is afraid that he will realize his own flaws and be crushed emotionally because of this hard realization. And that is also one thing that marks out who Holden Caulfield really is, he is a boy who does not know how he should manage how he feels and therefore he is afraid of his own feelings in a strange kind of way. To sum up Holden Caulfield-s personality from this brief analysis I would say that he is a complete emotional wreck-ship that has hit the bottom and having a hard time getting up to the surface. Holden