I am reading Ender's Game which is a science fiction story about the Coming of Age experience. So the story takes place in the future and it is about how the earth is being attacked by aliens or "buggers" which is what they are called in the book. The only person who can stop them is a particular military genius, Ender Wiggins to be specific. Ender has the skills needed for the job but the only problem is that he is just a child. Now he is recruited for military training by the government into battle school. As soon as he enters battle school his childhood is over though so in order for him to survive he has to learn how to survive on his own. His Coming of Age experience starts now.
One part of that Coming of Age experience is learning how to be away from your parents. That is something that Ender has to learn how to do because remember Ender is only six when he enters Battle school. In Battle school they totally isolate him from his family. For example in the book they talk about how if your family writes any letters you won't receive them. The only way you will receive them is if the school wants you to. So basically Ender can't interact with his family. In class we talked about how most of our character's have parents issues in our books. For my character though it is really complicated because its not that his parents are bad parents, its just that he is away from them. Personally I think that his parents being good parents can be debatable because they sent him to Battle school in the first place but I guess it's for the planet.
Another part of the Coming of Age experience is how you do under pressure because there is a lot of pressure when you are growing up. In Ender's Game, Ender is put under a lot of pressure because the survival of the human species depends on him. The thing is he is only six and you are putting this much pressure on him. That is hard to deal with and I don't think he is dealing with it well. I mean it's not only the pressure that he has to deal with, he has to deal with loneliness too. He has to deal with being away from his family for a very long time. He is doing well under all this pressure,
I think that you can learn a lot about the Coming of Age experience from Ender's Game. For example in Ender's Game they talk about a lot of problems that children face in the world. Some of those problems are being away from your parents or being under to much pressure. Those are problems that kids face everyday and their childhood is messed up because of that. What I mean by that is lets say you don't have a father figure around or a mother figure around, you are going to turn out very differently than if you had both parents. When you only have one parents that can effect you in many different ways. Those effects can have bad outcomes on you in the future.
