photo credit: Mackenna Miller
Lilly, like any average teenage girl, is in Sephora browsing makeup and skincare products. She expected to walk into a fun, welcoming environment with other teenage and young adult girls.
Instead, she walked into a warzone. Pre-teens plagued the store throwing tantrums and causing scenes about not getting the $300 worth of products that they want.
Sephora was once a safe place for teenagers and young adults like Lilly to wander the aisles and shop for their beauty and relaxation needs. Now, it has been overtaken by spoiled pre-teens spending hundreds of dollars on products they won’t need until they’re 25 years old.
These occurrences have become so common that witnesses and victims of these tantrums are now a widely popular discussion topic on TikTok. However, “Sephora Kids” aren’t the only child-related concern plaguing TikTok discussions.
A similar discussion issue relating to kids includes “iPad kids”. Children with unrestricted access to the internet and its adult content.
Sephora pre-teens and “iPad kids” are suffering from the same issues: they lack basic empathy and maturity. This problem is caused by their overexposure to adult content from the internet.
When these kids have access to content intended for adults such as skincare or makeup reviews or suggestive and inappropriate jokes, it becomes something they want to be part of despite not being able to understand it yet. This phenomenon is now referred to by many as “kids getting older younger” (KGOY) by taking part in adult markets and product consumption even though it’s not yet meant for them.
Kids growing up too fast is harmful for a variety of behavioral and childhood development reasons. Apart from the obvious contributor of unrestricted internet access, KGOY has also been caused by the pandemic and overprotective parenting practices by millennials.
According to Business Insider, experts believe lockdowns led to children not being able to deal with conflict and awkwardness because they’ve had such little experience with those types of situations. Children have begun to avoid such situations possibly leading to lower emotional intelligence and maturity.
Additionally, children’s friendships through online gaming spiked dramatically over the pandemic. Many of these “friends” kids have met online, they’ve never met in person and neither have their parents, according to Morning Consult.
This leaks into the next cause: unrestricted access to the online world. The so-called “friends” that kids could be making while online gaming could likely be exposing them to older, adult material if the games themselves already aren’t.
When a 10 year old plays online with a 15 year old, the 10 year old can be exposed to vocabulary and jokes of teenagers, leading to knowledge of topics like sex, drugs or alcohol at a much earlier age. This is a more common occurrence than one might think as 24 percent of Generation Alpha parents report their kids have online friends that they’ve never met in person, according to Morning Consult.
Naturally, parents and experts have begun to realize the dangers of unlimited access to the internet, and they have begun to overprotect their kids so much to the point they’re actually harming their kids, according to Business Insider.
Parents have become so scared of their children being exposed to inappropriate content that they have limited their socialization to much smaller amounts than what is considered healthy or normal. This problem causes children to be unable to deal with various social situations, like what was discussed previously with the pandemic.
Ultimately, it’s clear that kids growing up too fast is not only harming others but it’s also harming the kids as well. Parents need to start setting limitations to their kids’ internet access and encouraging them to participate in other social activities.
