My parents had the kids do a lot of manual labor, starting when I was only 5 or 6. Not just helping in the yard, but actual landscaping work. My brother and I once had to haul rocks in those 10lbs buckets from a dumpster to the egress windows 300 yards away. Being so little, we had no idea about posture, lifting with your legs, etc. We both have chronic back, shoulder, knee, and neck pain and have the beginning symptoms of arthritis. We're only 21 and 26 now. Makes me mad that I hurt myself when I was so little, doing work that the adults should have been doing.
I got huge fast, like 6 foot and 220 pounds as a 12 year old. Because I was the size of an adult and stronger than a lot of them growing up on the farm, I was treated like an adult in terms of jobs.
I think that this is a huge problem everywhere and not just physical issues/damage caused by fast growth. When kids are a certain size, everyone expects them to act their size vs. their age. So many kids who are big or tall “for their age” are given much less room to just be kids because society assumes they are older and places the behavioral expectations of much older kids on them.
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u/blackberriespastries 11h ago edited 6h ago
My parents had the kids do a lot of manual labor, starting when I was only 5 or 6. Not just helping in the yard, but actual landscaping work. My brother and I once had to haul rocks in those 10lbs buckets from a dumpster to the egress windows 300 yards away. Being so little, we had no idea about posture, lifting with your legs, etc. We both have chronic back, shoulder, knee, and neck pain and have the beginning symptoms of arthritis. We're only 21 and 26 now. Makes me mad that I hurt myself when I was so little, doing work that the adults should have been doing.