Our Notions Of Maturity

Factual Questions
1

This is a very general question: are our notions of maturity, in the psychological sense, essentially modern or have they always existed in one form or another?

As recently as fifty years ago it was considered normal, even healthy, even proper, for a young woman to live with her parents, in her family, till marriage. With the rise of feminism and the changes in societal norms such customs have largely vanished from the mainstream by the 70s. I’ve known of women of my generation who remained with their parents who took a lot of flak (that’s putting it politely) from friends and family members, many of whom found it odd, immature, that these women didn’t move out and live in their own. This struck me as cruel. Who decides what’s grown up? Our peers, psychologists?

A hundred years ago, even in America, it was common for people to live in the same community all their lives. People moved around more in the States than elsewhere, yet even here people tended to remain in their “regions” (the South, the West), and in certain kinds of places, with city folk tending to stay urban, country folk often shunning the city or suspicious of people with city backgrounds, who were often regarded as unscrupulous.

Where am I going with this? Our society has changed dramatically, thus an individual’s evolution, in a broad sense, is considered desirable as much in terms of geography as class. Once upon a time it was considered a good thing, a normal thing, a mature thing, to stay put, work the farm one grew up on or continue farming on one’s own (newly acquired) property. The sons of tradesmen as often as not became tradesmen, the sons of ministers, ministers, and so on. Today, I notice, it’s almost the opposite, at least where I come from (the urban northeast), as staying home, doing the same thing your father did, not moving on to another town, up in class or out in some geographical sense (i.e. out of state, to anotjer part of the country or even another nation) is considered backward, if not immature somewhat backward.

2

To me, the phrase “notions of maturity” would refer to an individual’s ability and responsibility to make decisions. This applies to things like being responsible enough to vote or drive, mature enough to get married, or whether it is the parents or kid who get punished when the kid does something wrong.

The question of an adult who still lives with the parents is a whole different thing. And finances are making it more common all the time.

3

Of course, 50 or 200 or 2000 years ago, not only was the psychological attitude towards maturity different, the societal attitude towards it was different. In the times of the Roman republic, a father had absolute power over his children, even when they were grown up in their 20s or 30s - he could sell them as slaves if he wanted.
50 years ago, a woman did not have full maturity legally, she needed her husbands consent to get a job or manage her own finances. So of course the psychological attitudes towards maturity reflected the expectations of society, and vice versa.

Today, psychology considers each person should strive towards becoming adult, that is, responsible for their own choices, self-reflective, non-selfish against others, not doormat, etc. In the past, this notion existed, but was applied only towards a small group of people.

4

if your behavior is conducive to you having enough money (or substitutes) to maintain the expected lifestyle in your culture than you are “mature” and “socially adjusted”. If your behavior is not conducive to that, than you are not.

Everything else follows from this principle. If working your parents’ farm was a good way to do it back then (or right now, just not in America), then people doing are “mature” enough.

5

Agreed. Unfortunately, my impression - perhaps inaccurate, I will concede at once - is that many of them are freeloading and not trying terribly hard to get a job that would permit them to move out on their own, even making allowances for a crappy economy.

6

I appreciate all the responses. My OP was truncated when I hit the wrong button, thus it’s about half the length I intended it to be, which, as I think about it, may not be a bad thing.

When I think of words like maturity as they apply to human behavior I get a bit uneasy. At times it seems like maturity, like so many other human traits that ought to belong to the individual have been in many respects “taken by others”. You’re not mature (or kind, honest, etc.) because you say you are, think you are, you’re mature when other’s say you are.

Of course this has always been the case: we live in a world of other people. However, in the past, such concepts were more vague, amorphous; there were no social sciences to speak of. One could earn a good reputation or have a bad one based on one’s behavior, and that we was end of it. Now there are tests to determine such things, people with training in psychology, human resources and education have a great deal of power these days and have become the arbiters of human behavior, and I’m uncomfortable with it.

At times it feels like the very idea of,–forget maturity–normality, is drifting away from people, becoming the property, as if were, of others. Or maybe it’s just me. A bad mood, a paranoid “epiphany”? Maybe. I hope so.

7

it’s not hard to imagine economic and political changes that would deprive all these people with “training in psychology, human resources” and other forms of modern pseudo-scientific BS of whatever power they happen to have. The Party officials in Soviet Russia used to think they had power to decide what was and was not normal - but around 1990 that power evaporated pretty quickly. Similar changes happened to authorities in various other fallen regimes, such as that of the Shah of Iran or the Taliban of Afghanistan. The changes are not always for the better, but change does come, frustrating the desires of such folks to push people around.

8

Keep in mind that in the “good old days” housing, like food and everything else, was expensive. In a lot of families, their livlihod was the farm, and the children helped run it. Ditto for family businesses like the store; Isaac Asimov recounts in his biography having to work n his father’s candy store even into his teens, without regular pay. It’s how things were done.

Private houses were a dream for most until the boom of suburban building and the freedom of the automobile. you lived at home because when mama and papa died, that was your house. If you moved out, odds are you lived in a rooming house, not a private house or apartment, unless you had a really good job. (I remember reading how after his inaguration, the president of the United States - Adams? -walked back to his rooming house for the night.)

With the advent of womens’ lib, meritocracy and minimum wage rules, a youg person with a good education, of either sex, can expect to earn around the same wage as a person with 20 years’ experience, if they have ability and training. This spells independence. Plus, modern banks which will lend you a mortgage with almost no money down are a recent phenomenon (that came along with that suburban building boom) so you did not have to scrimp for 10 or 20 years to afford that first house.

So the tide has turned since WWII from “why would you leave home before you have to” to “why would you stay at home when you don’t have to?”. (Ignoring the slackers who haven’t gotten the means).

Mobility has helped. People go much farther afield for education and jobs. I don’t know I’d call it maturity, so much as independence. Plus there’s the emotional angle - do a quick survey about how many people actually sit down for a family meal once the kids are teenagers today, or even before. ITGOD - You ate tgether when the meal (a lot of work) was prepared, or you didn’t eat. Restaurants were a rare treat for most. Today, a significant number of meals are take-out and the family is not so close or so often together; so leaving is not the trauma it used to be. People used to know their neighbours, now we are sequestered behind airconditioning or in impersonal apartments and do not know our immediate neighbors more often than not.

Perhaps with the new cellular technology, people are getting closer again but without the need for physical proximity. Or maybe we are all even more detached, texting and twittering without the need to interact as real people in real time…

9

I agree with the overall gist of your post, but I it should be obvious that you are describing a bygone era in American history. And this particular paragraph, about a young person earning as much as a guy with a long resume (even regardless of their relative abilities, potential and so forth) is a good illustration of that. Go to the nearest job board and see how many companies are hiring people with the training (or let’s say demonstrable intelligence and ability) rather than with the experience.

10

Well, I think another issue is different cultures. There are some cultures where young people are assumed to be on their own at 18, while others, such as my girlfriend’s, people live with their parents until they are married.

This has some odd situations- Even if that person (say, in their early twenties) lands a nice full-time job, has their own car, house, etc if they aren’t married, they still live with mom and dad. The house they own? they rent it out till they get married then move into it. It was quite a culture shock when I was being told this, but I did see her side of it-

In that kind of family unit, members are much more tight-knit- even in their adulthood they still eat and socialize together. They have a much bigger safety net, so to speak, if one of them encounters a problem (money, health, etc) since the other siblings/parents are more than willing to care for the family member struggling. When someone lives alone, this is harder to do because often people that are independent can inadvertantly be a little too proud to ask for help, ask for help too late or resent that they have to move back in with their parents.

So I think Maturity is also based on the culture itself, and in the US anyway, there are a lot of cultures. If I did what I’m doing (living alone, call parents every other week, occasionally go to family functions) in their culture, it would be seen as very disrespectful because unmarried adult children only move out if there was some falling out- moving away unmarried is seen as an ‘insult’ to them. However in contrast living with my parents in my culture is kind of seen as a ‘manchild’, someone too inept, independent, or ambitious enough to strike out for my own, a ‘moocher’.

11

I’m not sure I understand. Most journeyman Joe the Plumbers will make the same, whether they’ve been plumbing for 5 years or 30. (Except Joe the Plumber wasn’t a real plumber, was he?) A secretary for the government or a driver for Fed-Ex makes the same whether he’s 25 or 55, I assume. To do otherwise would invite an age-discrimination suit. I assume it would be an interesting case defending against an age-discrimination suit if you demanded 20 years experience for a simple truck-driver job.

In the case of a network engineer or a civil engineer, yes, accumulated experience and proven track record are an important part of “qualifications” and hence merit extra pay, but I know that some 55-yo system analysts make the same amount as the 30-yo ones. Similarly, what used to institutionalized slave labour entry jobs - graduate students, doctor interns, unpaid internships in business, etc. are one by one being converted to real jobs or eliminated. I recently saw an article about the expected 70-hour weeks at prestigious legal firms and how it is discriminatory for young women (who are usually the ones having to do child care, cannot put in those hours).

Similarly, basic living costs much more; while you can get by without cable TV, a cell phone, big-screen TV, even a car - the entry-level cost of living to live a normal life in today’s society is much more demanding. We have solved this problem by making both spouses work to pay this high cost. However, the basics for a single person - small apartment, simpler amenities - is something a person working something better than a minimum wage job should be able to afford.

12

I think you’re talking about three different phenomena:

  1. Societal expectations/definitions of “maturity.” Yes, these change over time and through generations.

  2. Economics of staying near your parents or your community: throughout history, people have followed the jobs, and inheriting your parent’s farm is no longer an option (or an attractive option) for most people.

  3. Single women staying at home: before women entered the workforce, they were considered liabilities. That women today no longer need to be married to leave their parents’ home is considered a reflection of the rise of women’s rights and status in the society.

13

What country are you referring to?

14

I know it from Germany, but since this is an outgrowth of the Victorian values, I assume - without looking it up in details - that this was still the norm in many western countries and the US, too, in the 1950s. In the US, women lost their whole name when marrying until recently: Jane Miller became Mrs. John Smith after marriage. Like voting rights for women, it took some time to get away from the idea that women were frail creatures, unsuited to the working world, since men as breadwinners would provide for them, anyway; that women had weak minds that should not be bothered with complicated things like finance, so her father/ husband/ brother would manage her finances; and that her morals were weak, so living alone would tempt her into sin (besides not having money to pay for living alone, because not being allowed legally and socially to work for a living, only decent work to find a husband).
Therefore, it was socially accepted and proper for a young woman to live under the care and protection of her father until the husband took over.

Today, these attitudes have changed, but look at movies with Doris Day or similar from the 1950s and 60s, there’s prominently the attitude that women need a man to take care of them because they can’t live on their own.

15

What you said is that in 1960 a woman did not have “full maturity” legally and was unable to hold a job or make financial decisions without a husband’s consent. Not in Victorian times, in 1960. I would strongly suggest that if that was the case anywhere, it certainly was not the case in most of the Western world.

It also would not have been true in West Germany in 1960; whatever the social expectations, women were legally able to hold jobs and do banking for themselves.

16

Historically, the attitudes of society change first, then the old strict laws are changed to adapt the new views. The US, with a different culture - women could go to colleges already at the beginning of the 20th century there, although I don’t know about universities; at the same time, Marie Curie had a difficult time studying at the Sorbonne in Paris because she was a woman - so some aspects like working might have been easier. Also, generally, women’s rights didn’t come as one encompassing parcel in any country - there was always progress in some areas, backwards in others. And having a right on paper and practising that right without repercussions are also two different things.

If you look at this broad timeline, you will see “legal majority” coming up in different European countries at different times.
For example:

Obviously, the latter means that unmarried women didn’t get full majority status at that time!

The quickest I could find was wikipedia

17

My mother in law moved from Connecticut to Arizona in 1965 after her husband died. Why? Because it was impossible for her as an unmarried woman to obtain credit. In CT at the time, women were legally considered in the same catgory as children for most matters financial. In fact, she had found it very hard to even get a lease on an apartment without a man to sign for her; most places would not rent to a woman since the contract was legally unenforceable since she wasn’t legally an adult. This depsite being 30+ years old and with 2 kids. She *was *able to get a job, but not much of one.

In AZ things were much more modern.

The federal law (Equal Credit Opportunity Act - Wikipedia) which eliminated this state-by-state chattel-izing of women wasn’t passed until 1974. And a lot of people fought very hard to prevent this from passing, certain that treating women as adults would be the end of the Civilized World.

We (the USA) are not that far removed from the time when what we now think of as “our rights” only applied to white men of means. And I say that as a white man of means.

18

I lived at home until I was 23, which was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long, I should have done it a lot sooner. And yes, I was ‘not mature’, I had an ill-paying job, and I was really, really poor, but it would have been better to live in a refrigerator box behind the mall than stay at home. If I’d had a big, jolly, loving family to sit around the dinner table with, swapping tales of the daily grind, then going out to milk the cow and feed the barn cats - I’d still be living there, wouldn’t I?