Morality in `Tween` fashion

THE TWEENING OF CHILDHOOD AND POSTMODERN LIMBO

Shakespeare in his play As You Like It said that a man 's age is divided into seven stages , nowhere in all these stages was the mention of `Tweens

In recent years , a new phase of life has been marked out by marketers . This new phase pertains to kids and is denoted by the term `tweens . The term refers to children between age eight and twelve , that is , children who are yet to step on to the threshold of youth known by the term `teenage

. One wonders , why the need was felt to give upper age children a separate name tag and hence a separate identity tag ? Till the nineteenth century , it was the `coming of age , that is , age twenty-one which was valorized as it denoted a transition from minor to adulthood . This transition brought in its wake new liberties , albeit with new responsibilities and it was the proper execution of these responsibilities , rather than enjoyment of new liberties which denoted the new adult 's maturity . After the Second World War , the social and psychological changes , along with speedy technological advancement conferred a cult status to teenage . It was portrayed as a magical age of new sensations and feelings , of infatuations and sexual awakening . It was the age when parents loosened their tight control on children and the latter in turn were gradually initiated into adulthood . Teenagers were viewed as a group different from the immature kids and boring adults . It was correctly perceived by psychologists as a difficult age when the human body undergoes various changes in preparation for the full maturity of the body it was the time when puberty was reached . Mood swings , rebelliousness belligerence , vehemence and sexual awakening were accepted as normal and allowances were made accordingly . But today `coming of age , and `teenage ' has become passy as the new celebrities of growing up years are the tweens

It was the media which in the current age of cable network and internet conferred this special attention to pre-teens purely for mercantile reasons . When enough products for the new adult and the teenager had been manufactured , so much so , that the consumer market for these two age groups were over-exploited by numerous competitors , when the charm of sensationalizing these two age groups had passed away , the agencies of marketing and advertising turned their attention to the age group prior to teenage . This group proved very susceptible to the influence of television because of its inability to gauge right from wrong , because of its inability even to understand that it is being exploited by advertisers purely for monetary reasons . Whenever advertisers turn their attention to any group , it is for the sole purpose of turning them into consumers and what better way of turning the group into buyers than by making them feel that they are different from all other groups . The marketers correctly gauged the pester power of these kids in getting their parents to buy what they wanted...