Maturing Teens: Then and Now Back in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, children were put to work at a very young age. They cleaned, cooked, cared for the land their family owned, and also took care of other siblings in the household. These responsibilities pushed the children into maturing and growing up faster than expected. Robert Frost presents this theme in his poem “Out, Out—.” In this poem he shows how young children are taking on the responsibilities of adults, which causes the teens to age earlier in life. By comparing the time back then and the time now, people will find that not only are the children growing and aging at a young age, but also that they are in two different ways.When Frost wrote this poem, it was around the time that not very many children went to school because they had to stay home and help their parents tend to the land so they could survive. In “Out, Out—“, Frost presents a young boy who lives with his family in Vermont, and is expected to work their land just like a grown man would. At the beginning of the poem, the young boy is cutting wood with a saw. Frost says, “The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard and made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,…” In this statement Frost explains how the young boy cuts the wood, which is more like a job than a helpful chore. This wasn’t unusual for the teens back than because as soon as they are old enough to work, they start working to help provide for their family. In order for these families to survive properly in their time, they had to have many children to enable them to have plenty of workers to work the land. If they didn’t have children, or very little of them, their land wouldn’t produce anything and therefore the family would not survive. Therefore, children were being produced for the sole purpose that as soon as they were of age, they would be put to work s...