Ironically, I suspect that what we’ve done is to postpone maturity. Many, maybe most, middle class young adults know that Mom and Dad will be there to help out if they screw up big time. The result, IMO, is a whole lot of forty year old adolescents!
I don’t have data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that degree of responsibility corresponds more directly to maturity than degree of privilege.
Well, if we’re going by brain power, I’m smarter (according to many standardized tests and a lack of stupid decisions) than many adults, especially those undergoing mid-life crises. Why can they drink and I can’t?
Look, I’m arguing that straight age sucks as an indicator of maturity. You are making my point for me. Also, has it occured to anyone that we as a culture are enabling people who don’t become sentient until their mid-twenties, and that this has skewed data? I personally have no problem with this, but I am irritated that people assume I am one of them just because I share an age category with them.
Hmmm. In some cultures, I’ve heard it said, a boy is not considered a man until his father has died. This could be how it arose; you don’t get to be a grownup until you really can’t rely on the guy who raised you. This probably (;)) isn’t a good legal standard for maturity, but it’s an interesting aside.
An “adulthood test” is an interesting idea, but since sentences for minors are so much more lenient than sentences for adults, as Eowyn the Mercotan points out it’s really easy to game the system. One way around that would be to tie major priviledges to the test (some subset of drinking, smoking, driving, NOT voting, etc), providing an incentive to get those priviledges as early as possible, but frankly I’m dubious of any assessment with that much power.
Well, we have some really stupid adults with all above privelages. And what is needed for someone to be mature? If someone knows that touching a hot stove will burn you, and does so anyway, there’s not much you can do for them. I would keep the people who know about hot stoves away from them and let anyone who knows but doesn’t care go hang, metaphorically.
Also, how are we defining maturity?
The question: If you treat a teener like an adult, is he/she more likely to act like one?
The answer ain’t a simple one, I think. First of all, what kind of experience and background do the teens in question have?
As a former social worker and psychiatric aide, it is my experience that if you were raised in an atmosphere of lies, mendacity, criminality, violence, betrayal, mistrust, and so on…
…then “treating you like an adult” is likely to cause you to promise the grownup anything, and then promptly attempt to get away with whatever you think you can get away with, and then lie like a rug the minute you get caught.
On the other hand, if you were raised in an atmosphere of accountability, respect, trust, and so on, it can go quite differently; Taran, above, makes a very true point about the kids living up or down to one’s expectations for them.
GENERALLY, that is. Not always. My folks were about as straight arrow as you could get, and for some reason, I turned into a rampaging zoo animal and didn’t grow out of it until my early twenties.
As to age eighteen being an arbitary point: Well, yeah, I think so. Durned if I can really point out any differences in myself between ages seventeen and eighteen. For that matter, the state of Texas changed the drinking age from eighteen to nineteen… WHILE I was eighteen. As a result, I could legally drink at eighteen, at the same time that OTHERS who were also eighteen … could NOT drink legally.
If that ain’t arbitrary, I don’t know what is.
For that matter, the Magic Age hasn’t always BEEN eighteen. Depending on where you are and what year it’s been, the magic age has ranged from thirteen to 25. I suspect that “eighteen” is the big one here, because it more or less corresponds to the end of high school.
Taking on adult responsibilities: Well, duh. At eighteen, you can go to war and shoot people. But, for some reason, you can’t drink a beer in most states. Go figure.
A case could be made that we should move the magic age up to 25, simply due to the fact that modern life is a lot more complicated, now, than it was back when you could go out, get married, and start a farm at fourteen. Hell, just learning how your friggin’ INSURANCE works these days damn near requires a night course!
…but there’s a bad side to this.
Recently, I returned to college, to get my teaching certification (I’m in my late thirties, by the way). The college in question was the same college I attended twenty years ago, when I was a rampaging zoo animal, upside down half the day and night on whiskey and drugs.
Y’know what? I gave up drink and drugs before I was 21.
No, really. I was afraid I was becoming an alcoholic, and I needed to kick my amphetamine habit, so I gave it all up. For a variety of reasons, I never really got started back into serious substance abuse again.
So… basically… my worst “misspent youth” period was around ages eighteen and nineteen, right?
Nowadays, the drinking age is 21, and drug laws are much more seriously enforced than they were back in 1982.
And y’know what? When I hear my fellow students talk about “Oh, wau, I was SO drunk last night,” or “I was so high, I slept with this guy, and I didn’t know who he was when I woke up this morning!”…
…I’m hearing it from people who are, like, 20, 21, 22.
It amazes me.
Man, I had all that stupid craziness WELL out of my system by the time I was THAT old! What the hell kind of stupid kids are these, who are screwing up like that when they’re 21, for potato’s sake!
…
…
…
…um… well… they’re kids. They’re kids who, due to the law and its firm enforcement… never got a chance to experiment with this stuff when they were teeners.
And now, as actual adults, they’re making the same stupid mistakes I already had out of the way when I was NINETEEN.
…
I’m not sure what this proves, but I look forward to your responses…
Being (intellectually) smarter does not make you “smarter” in a different sense of the word. Besides, there are plenty of intellectually “smart” people who are common sense dumb (no offense intended).
What I was referring to was more basic. Actual physical, psychological and developmental maturity of the brain and thought processes only reach “maturity” in the mid- to late 20s, according to that published reasearch I mentioned earlier. Also, as I said I cannot find the cite but the information was in the mainstream media within the past year.
Unfortunately, society would have a hard toime coming up with a variable “age requirement.” Look at the problems that exist with maturity level difference between teenage boys and girls. Even then, it is not across the board for one gender as each matures in different areas at different times.
So society, probably based on anectdotal evidence chose age 18 as the dividing line. What I was offering in my last post is that after recent research, we as a society may have erred on the low side.
I do not dismiss your comment that our society may be enabling people until their mid-20s. Don’t forget that there used to be multi-generational families where the grandparents raised their grandchildren because the parents worked, or other reasons. We may be going back to that in some circles because of economic conditions. We also may be going back to that because we’ve been coddling the younger generations for far too long.
There is no universal answer. The “age 18” factor may be arbitrary, but at least it is a dropped anchor in this floating morass of society.
In the darkest sense, I think we do not have enough chlorine in the gene pool. Now look how messy things are turning out. 
I am 14 (almost 15) and i know that if an Adult talks to me and treats me like an adult then i do act like an adult. If we are treated like adults then we feel we should act like adults in return, if we are treated like children then some teens act like children, i believe this is becsue they fell they should act like children because adults think they are children.
Obviuosly sometimes it can go too far and teens begin to think they are adults and can get into a lot of trouble, adults should talk to teens like they are adults, discuss things through, talk about things, and i think that in most cases teens who are spoken to like adutls behave a lot better than those who are spoken to like children.
And when I leave the parking lot I spin out, real cool,
And you know what that means:
I’m Strong!
I’m Eighteen!
I don’t buy my own tires!
The vast majority of teenage children have no idea what being “treated like an adult” really means. It means that you work or you starve. It means that you spend all day at a job or similar situation or you freeze in winter. It means you pay your own way. Some teenage children can handle that. Most of them can’t.
Want to be treated like an “adult”? Demand we restore the military draft and lower the age to 13.
Right now, young men in this country are required to register for Selective Service years before it is legal for them to drink. So really, Dogface, being eligible for the draft does not earn young people any respect in the eyes of their elders.
That’s when you’re with adults.
What about when you’re with other teens, completely without adults?
This is where my faith in teens ends, and so should that of Parents.
Teens (generally) are good at being respectful when their present company/context calls for it. They are also notoriously disrespectful when the context calls for it.
Adolescence is marked by a sort of “moral marshmallow” (Kohlberg) condition wherein an adolescent knows and believes what the right thing to do is, but will forsake that morality easily so as not to go against the group.
So on drinking, maybe at age 16 you can go to bars with your parents and have a drink, maybe legal in the home with the parents makes sense.
I still think voting should come with the ability to drive. I think we should trust 15-16 year olds to make mature informed decisions about political issues, particularly if they’re in schools, where people are (hopefully) seeing to it that they are informed about issues and candidates.
Either way, it seems like people are ripe for involvement in politics at an earlier age than we give them credit for.
I keep reading statements to the effect of “if we treat kids like adults, they will act like it”. How do we know this is the case? I am more inclined to think that those teens who act mature, when treated that way were: A) already were acting somewhat mature so adults B) treated them in a way befiting their attitudes.
Adults have no motivation to treat some kid who continually acts like a doof, like an adult. I would be interested in knowing which comes first: A youth, acting mature, or an adult treating a youth like an adult.
Got news for you. If they’re in uniform and on base, the drinking age is 18.
Of course, since you’re fundamentally dishonest, you neatly ignored the majority of my post.
Being an adult means paying your own way.
And kids who are continually treated as doofs have no motivation to act as adults. It’s something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, I know, but since institutional policies nail the mature teens as well as the mature ones (drinking age, f’rintance), they should be more carefully considerd for the messages they send. How would you behave if everyone and everything was geared to the assumption that you were dangerous, immature, and liable to drunkenly screw anything that couldn’t lurch away?
First of all, do teenagers even have the mental capacity to act like adults? We all know teens can fake it but a mature person acts mature even when they are unsupervised.
Second, most people in their TWENTIES barely qualify as mature adults.
The only way for someone to become an adult is to be treated like one (once they are ready). That means being financially independent. Unfortunately, that is nearly impossible in todays society before the age of 23.
“I still think voting should come with the ability to drive. I think we should trust 15-16 year olds to make mature informed decisions about political issues, particularly if they’re in schools, where people are (hopefully) seeing to it that they are informed about issues and candidates.”
Yeah…I can’t wait to see President Timberlake’s policy on health care reform.
Treat an egg like a chicken all you want, it still ain’t clucking till it’s a little older.
There is no doubt that if you treat someone with respect, they’re more likely to act respectfully (at least I hope there’s no doubt).
The problem is that adolescents really aren’t equipped for certain responsibilities yet. They need training wheels, warm up exercises, they need to wear a helmet and knee pads; and they won’t (generally) if not made to do so.
We should be looking for ways that treat them more in congruency with who they are rather than who we want them to be.
Treating teens like adults dishonors who they are as much as treating them like kids.
Fantastic. Eighty years ago, you would’ve been dismissing women’s suffrage with “I can’t wait to see President Gary Cooper’s policy on health care reform.”
By fifteen all my friends and I knew about politics and had differing opinions on who should run the country. Seems that quite a few adults in California are picking sitcom stars and porn actresses to run for governor :rolleyes:
(btw, I’m 22)
Ah yes. All adults pay their own way, stand and fall on their own merit, make money or starve.
Unless they’re given a baseball team or an oil company.
Not a political jab! He was the best example I could think of!
Speaking as a teenager also (17 here), I’d like to say that I act like an adult even when I’m with my friends. There’s just a lot more jokes about sex involved. I’m actually the “goody-goody” in my group- never done drugs, got drunk, etc. Sometimes I get exasperated that I’m one of the few people I know (both under and above 18) who don’t make asshat decisions, but I guess that makes me a special case.
My point is, if we treated children like responsible adults all the time, i.e, we raised them like they were miniature responsible citizens, I think the idea of “coming of age” would be obsolete. I’m not saying we give kids every right we can think of and watch them smack their heads into walls; I’m saying that if they ask to do something stupid, like go chase cars or something, you tell them no and EXPLAIN WHY NOT. Don’t use the excuse “because I say so.” I’ve learned that that doesn’t wash w/ kids. If, when they get a little older and learn about drugs and such, and want to try it, let them, provided they’re around you so you can make sure they don’t OD or do anything dumber than, say, use a lampshade as a party hat. Only let them try it when you’re around though.
Well, I got a little off the topic, but that’s where I stand on this.