The Theme Of Responsibility In To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

Goals, Problems, or Responsibility?
Harper Lee explores the story of two young children learning to become adults through all of their struggles in her historical fiction novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. With the opportunity to be able to learn to transition into adulthood from childhood, it brings many blessings but also many curses. Becoming an adult from an innocent child comes from many key components. The pieces of the puzzle for how children are taught to move from their innocent child-like state of being to adulthood are the ambitions of the child, discipline that occurs as a consequence of conflicts with the child, and the responsibility the child gains.
The very first part of how a child is taught to move to adulthood from childhood is through their ambitions. Scott D. Scheer, Stephen M. Gavazzi, and David G. Blumenkrantz capture the quote of G. Stanley Hall as he, Stanley Hall, “...[the author of the two-volume work Adolescence] described
adolescence as a breaking away from one’s childhood to prepare for adulthood, a period during which there are ever-present conflicting themes that the adolescent confronts (e.g., responsibility/irresponsibility, child-like ambitions/adult-like ambitions) in their social world” (Scheer, Gavazzi, and Blumenkrantz 1). According to Hall, children are prepared to become adults with confronting their conflicts. One such conflict of this would be ambitions. Every child has dreams and goals they want to achieve whether it is going to the moon, becoming an artist, or even to become a professional athlete. Children learn to start thinking like an adult by giving up their child-like ambitions, or dreams/goals, for adult-like ambitions, including, but not limited to, getting a job, going to college, and starting a family. Atticus gives an example of this in To Kill a Mockingbird after Jem and him get into an argument when he questions Jem, “‘You want to be a lawyer, don't you?’” (Lee 66). Atticus questions Jem’s ambitions as Jem is growing up. Jem has more adult-like ambitions, which Atticus wants him to continue to have these. Atticus did not like Jem pretending to be Boo Radley, so he teaches Jem with a reprimand, which refines a child’s ambitions to become more adult-like. A child can be taught to move to adulthood by their ambitions and learning to mature them.
The next part of how children are taught to move from childhood to adulthood is through the child’s conflicts.
Discipline is the end reaction, or result, of conflicts. Discipline is a huge part of a child’s conflicts because it lets them know between right and wrong. To be able to truly move to adulthood, one must learn the differences between good and bad as Scheer, Gavazzi, and Blumenkrantz further clarify in their article, Rites of Passage During Adolescence, how “Various academic disciplines have emphasized differently the impact of social context variables on adolescent development into adulthood” (Scheer, Gavazzi, and Blumenkrantz 1). As Scheer, Gavazzi, and Blumenkrantz depicted, discipline has a huge effect on sociality while transitioning into adulthood, just some types of discipline more than others. As a result of discipline being the effect of conflicts, a child’s social abilities is affected by the types of it given to a child. This is how a child is taught to move from innocent childhood to
adulthood.
The final “piece of the puzzle” of children becoming adults, so to speak, is the responsibility a child gains as they are becoming older. Giorgio Hadi Curti and Christopher M. Moreno explore the fact that “The becoming adult of the child can be understood as a ‘right’ of passage” (Curti and Moreno 415). Curti and Moreno analyze what responsibility is as a child becomes an adult. As Curti and Moreno proclaim, “rites of passage” are responsibilities. Some of these responsibilities that children learn to become an adult from are being able to have later curfews, being able to join in extracurricular activities, or having to work, to name a few. Children learn to transition from adulthood to childhood by having “rites of passage” because they are, according to Giorgio Curti and Christopher Moreno in Institutional Borders, Revolutionary Imaginings and The Becoming-Adult of a Child, “a movement through socially defined and linguistically pre-determined stages of already established cultural norms, behaviors, ideas, and expectations” (Curti and Moreno 415). “Rites of passage” are essentially what is expected of every maturing child. Children are supposed to know what they can and cannot do.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem and Scout are the perfect examples of how children learn to transition to adulthood. Over the course of Harper Lee’s story, Jem and Scout become older and more mature. The two children have child-like goals they want to achieve, but later the goals become more adult-like and realistic. Jem and Scout had plenty of problems and disciplined for their actions, whether right or wrong. Scout and Jem also get responsibilities throughout the course of the story. Scout has to go to school, and Jem has to watch Scout. To sum it all up, a child learns to move from their young childhood to adulthood by their ambitions, conflicts and discipline, and the responsibilities that come with maturing.