What would it be like to reach adulthood twice as fast?

In My Humble Opinion
1

There are various fictional settings where aging is stopped, delayed or altered in some way. My question is if a perfect method was devised for parents to have their children age twice to maturity twice as fast (meaning they’ll be identical to an 18 year old physically and mentally at the age of nine) in some ideal Star Trek/Culture style utopia how would this affect the children in question in terms of actual upbringing and what would the parents’ experience be?

Would they be better or worse off than someone who aged to 18 in the normal fashion?

2

It’s your magic. You tell us what you intend to happen.

Quibbling threadshit aside …

Clearly the overall rate of change will be 2x. Although kids don’t grow physically or mature mentally at anything like a smooth linear rate now. If we could keep their fastest rate for a couple extra years that might be enough to shorten the subsequent process a bunch.

Either new info would need to be presented to them at 2x the rate (on average) or else it’d have to take 1/2 the repetitions /exposires for the “lesson” to sink in, whether the “lesson” is how to control your feet well enough to stand, or learning about the commutative property of addition.

Turning to parents. They might be called upon to seed 2x the info and stimulation to raising kids. So it’d be the same total effort crammed into1/2 the time. Sounds exhausting.

From a societal POV, whatever is normal is normal. Once the initial adaptation occurs, this will be just as normal as what were used to.

3

I know I would have deeply appreciated having adult status at the age of 9. I was a militant children’s libber and hated the status of being a child.

I don’t recall any attitudes one way or the other about size. I didn’t resent being physically smaller than adults, for the most part, nor did I feel any kind of revulsion at the prospect that I was going to get larger and sprout hairs in new places and go through other physical changes.

Setting aside the internal stuff and shifting to the science-fictiony elements, I ate an amount of food, in the process of growing up, that seems amazing to think on now, especially between the ages (and sizes) of 10 through 20, so to grow twice as fast I would have to eat twice as much, more or less, right? Dear god I was already destroying ten or eleven pieces of chicken at supper and decimating those all-you-can-eat buffets. Bring me a whole cow, I guess, roasted on a spit. What else? Hmm, I’d be blasting through clothing sizes faster than I could wear the clothes out, including shoes. Could pass them on to other twice-as-fast kids growing up, though.

I wouldn’t be learning twice as fast in school, right? Takes just as long to get a handle on transformational geometry and learning the key facts of the French and Indian War or memorizing Ozymandias as it does growing at the normal speed? But honestly I felt like they were doling it out in little spoonfuls and repeating 90% of it with just a little bit new each year, so if I had the chance to try a twice-as-fast curriculum I might do okay with it. I always wished I’d been in one of those accelerated student programs, never got to be.

I’d hit physical puberty before having the emotional maturity for relationships, but, ermm, that was kind of the case anyhow, and if the tradeoff were a shortening of the time between when I got seriously interested in girls in a sexual way and the time when I had an opportunity to do anything about it, that might be worth it.

Hmm, going back to the opening topic of having adult status, would we have that at nine? Or would we be treated legally and socially as six-foot-tall 130-pound nine-year-olds who still need babysitters and stuff?

4

I guess the question is - to paraphrase an old Dave Chapelle bit: “How old is 18, really?” You can vote, work full-time, drive, serve in the military, be a parent, sign contracts, be tried as an adult. But you can’t drink alcohol legally, and you’ll find a lot of parents and 20-somethings that think you shouldn’t expect mature behavior before 30.

5

Heh. I did not like kids when I was a kid. My best friend feels the same. Often thinking about other kids “Oh, grow up”

That, I know, really depends on your upbringing. Thinking about it, I had a lot of freedom many other kids did not enjoy. I was also given a lot of responsibilities.

6

The high drinking age vs 18 is totally Federal overreach vs traffic safety. Drunk 19yos drive very badly. This dates from the 1970s when the Federal 55mph speed limit came out.


They’re mostly right. I’m 65 and I’m just barely mature enough not to be crippled by immaturity.

7

Adulthood works like this: you don’t feel like you’re pulling it off, you never got the feeling of being in charge of your own life, not really, not quite, there’s still so much you don’t understand, faking your way through this “being a grownup” thing. And if you realize this is true for all the other adults, that none of us grew up and became more competent than we were as children, you’re one of the few who do, which is why it stays that way. Most people think it’s just them.

8

Questions like this remind me of a story I read several years ago, and which I need to track down the source of. It’s in one of my local history books but I don’t know which. Anyway, sometime in the mid 1800s a kid is sent from his farm into the city (Cincinnati) on a mule to pick up a big sack of seeds or barley or something. He navigated by himself to the shop, paid or confirmed pre-payment by his father, they loaded the sack onto the mule, and he started his journey home. Still in the city, I want to say in Lower Price Hill, the pack slipped and it was too heavy for the kid to reposition. So he sat on the curb and cried until some good samaritans happened by to help and send him on his way. This kid was no more than six years old.

Stories like that, along with the age of military heroes and political leaders of the past, many of whom were in their early 20s, shows that kids CAN be a lot more capable than we give them credit for. Yes they were raised in much more difficult circumstances, and we don’t hear about the ones who couldn’t cut it at such a young age, but I don’t think the OP’s scenario is all that far-fetched when you consider what growing up used to be like.

9

Said another way, childhood will be as long as parents permit it to be.

For some people childhood is lifelong. For others, it’s real brief.