By the time most kids are playing with toys, and playing video games, this little girl was balancing taking care of their little siblings, cleaning their whole houses, and managing responsibilities usually reserved for adults.

Being a girl people expect you to do a lot of things around the house but as a child it isn’t a teenage girl’s responsibility to take care of the entire household.

“I had to babysit my sister, clean up after all of us including my father, wash and dry laundry, do the dishes, and put my sister to bed every night,” Freshman Melodie Pennycook said.

Being a kid and getting older is supposed to be a fun thing that you only get to experience once in your life, unfortunately some children don’t get to experience that due to their parents.

“Growing up I never had much of a childhood,” Pennycook said. “I was always on the go.”

While being treated like an adult while being a little kid was so great, as Pennycook got older it started having some benefits in certain places.

“They give me an opinion,” Pennycook said. “I actually have a voice, and I can speak up on different things. Because in my household I’m not allowed to have an opinion.”

Getting older means more responsibility, but when you’ve already been given many big responsibilities your whole life it just makes life way harder.

“People in school treating me like an adult puts a lot of pressure on me,” Pennycook said. “It makes me get really overstimulated when I get too many responsibilities.”

In life mental health is a really important thing especially in your teenage years when your mind and body is changing, so it’s important for adults to pay attention to teenagers’ emotions and feelings when treating them older than they really are.

“When I get too many things to handle I lose motivation, and I just quit,” Pennycook said.

When adults treat teens as adults they need to decide whether they want that teenager to be a teen or an adult, as it causes lots of confusion in the teenage brain.

“They treat us like adults whenever it benefits them and treat us like kids whenever it benefits them,” Pennycook said.

While yes being a big sister treated like a parent may be hard, it leaves a good impression on the younger siblings showing that they are loved and cared for.

“She was always there when my people weren’t,” Pennycook’s eighth grade sister Kelsie said. “She was more like a parent to me than my dad was.”