In the comic Invincible there’s a character named Oliver that becomes a teenager in two years and then ages extremely slowly after becoming an adult because of his alien hybrid ancestry.
My question is what would it actually be like to raise a child that became a teenager physically and mentally in two years?
What would it be like to be said child and do you think you would be better or worse off than a child that aged normally?
Did he learn at that accelerated rate, too, or did his brain just develop to that stage physically? If it was just brain development, then that could be very bad for things like acquiring language (which happen much more easily when very young).
Ever heard of a threenager?
That would be rough. There are certain lessons, like “you can’t always have the snack you want”, that are a whole lot easier to teach when you are bigger and stronger than the person learning them. Dealing with a child who has not learned that, but can reach every cabinet in the kitchen, would be difficult.
Going through terrible twos with a boy who is already bigger and stronger than his Mom? Yikes! I think we would wind up with a lot of dangerous people out there.
A teenager is (duh) 13yo. so 13/2 = 6.5x faster. Said another way, every not-quite 2 months the kid gains the equivalent of a year.
You’re going to be buying a lot of toys and clothes that get used once before the kid outgrows them. If you hope to provide anything like the volume of interaction and stimulation and enrichment a human kid needs, there’s gonna need to be a fulltime parent per kid.
School, even private one-on-one self-paced school, is gonna have to really firehose the kid to deliver anything close to the volume of info and knowledge and intellectual habit-shaping fed to normal human kids in the very limited time available.
Everything would play out at super speed. Which sounds frenetic and stressful as hell for the parents.
And that’s setting aside any government involvement. A government whose rules and policies and whatnot simply have no slot this peg fits into.
The kid wouldn’t directly know anything other than what they experienced as they experienced it.
But real clearly their interaction with ordinary children would be utterly strange. This month you’re hanging out with almost toddlers learning about sharing toys. Next month you’re past all that, and need to be rehomed with different playmates. The next month you’re starting to read. And need new friends again.
By the time the kid is the equivalent of a human aged WAG 5, they’d have long since realized humans are incredibly slow learners and developers compared to themselves. Given they’ll recognize this while they themselves are an emotionally and intellectually immature developing mind, I call it the “Everyone is retarded but me” effect. Which will make their already weird life a lot weirder as they develop.
I took it differently. The OP said the kid matured physicall and mentally at super speed. I’m assuming “mentally” includes emotionally.
So the e.g. “terrible twos” would occur for about 9 weeks when the kid is 4 to 6 months old. And during those months looks and acts just like a typical terrible 2yo. But by the end of that two months, they’ll look and act like a 3yo freshly done being terribly two. Two months later they’ll be a typical 4yo. Etc.
Now if your interpretation is the correct one and I’m wrong, so the kid matures emotionally at normal human rate, that is a disaster. We’re raising monsters.
My bottom line:
It would suck utterly for everyone involved.
Setting aside ethics, it’d make a fascinating case study to raise this specimen sorta like the opposite of the talking chimps, feeding it information and experience like a lab animal just to see what the outcome is. For the chimps they had to be super patient and the animals made little progress per unit time. For this person it’d be the opposite; the humans, even a team of pros, would be struggling to feed info and experiences fast enough.
Ever owned a puppy?
He did.
It would be handy if your one year-old could go to the store and buy their own diapers.
Yes.
My vet reassured me, when I was thinking maybe I’d made a mistake, that the worst behavior you’ll ever see from your dog is at 5 - 10 months.
Yup.
The first dog I had from a puppy, I worked so hard to train, and she seemed like my ADHD puppy. She was in the slow group at obedience class, and she’d get a very long walk to tire her out right before (she was also the youngest dog there: she was 8mths, and then others were 10 - 14mths).
I kept trying, even though I wasn’t seeing much, then suddenly, around 15 months, she mellowed abruptly, all that training poured out, and she became the best dog in the world.
FWIW, potty-training before 2 can happen. Parents in the US don’t usually do it-- diapers go on till 3 & 1/2, sometimes-- but they used to, in the days of cloth diapers. And almost every kid I see with a mother (and sometimes a father) born outside the US is potty-trained by 2.
Not to hijack, but FTR, those chimp experiments were frauds.
Yes. Understood. The reported results were wildly out of sync w reality.
But the folks doing the actual training tasks (mostly) thought they were doing legit work at the time.
And my main point was simply contrasting trying to train something with normal human development pacing with something far faster (the OP’s miracle alien) or far slower (any real lower animal, chimps being an approachable exampe).
The Lil’wrekker walked and said short sentences by 10mos. One day at about a year old, I told her “come here, I need to change your wet diaper.”
She sat down and looked pensive and said “I not wike, diappies, no more, Ma”
We discussed, picture this: a language challenged Ma trying to tell a baby the ins and outs of potty training. It was comical to me, at the time. So it must of sounded ridiculous. Sign language, baby talk, and visual aids. Crazy!
Honest to God, she has one pee pee accident in training panties and never had another.
She was scary smart and precocious about everything she did.
We said it’s like she just a tiny adult. Wearing footy pjs, wanting her “paccie”(pacifier) and her lovey blankie.
Strange and exciting to raise a kid like that.