Hey the common age of legal adulthood in the West is not an arbitrary “cultural” thing, it’s ideally 18 at a minimum because that is when the human brain has gotten past its most intense emotional and hormonal development hurdles.
The difference in judgment is staggering even between someone who just turned 16 vs. someone 16.5; we do a MASSIVE amount of mental growing and changing crammed into those first two decades at a pace unrivaled by any other species.
And then even after your psychological state has calmed the fuck down around 18, we now know the effects of adolescent development continue until about age 25. You got over the worst of it, but 25 is when the parts of your brain responsible for the bulk of your reasoning skills actually wrap up their growth process.
Some further maturation seems to continue between 25 and 40, but some countries now recognize 25 as the official end of “adolescence” as far as psychologists are concerned.
This is why someone 20 should not be dating someone 16 even where it’s legal, why a 14 year old boy shot by police should not be described as a “man,” why we should be raising the age of military and police enlistment by a couple of years, and people probably shouldn’t start driving cars until at least 18-20 either.
If you’re under 18 you actually are mentally and physically a child in the most objective possible sense. That’s not an insult to any of you 17 and under, just try to have a nice childhood while you still can and don’t sneak into bars and join the air force and shit, you’ve got like up to 80 years ahead of you for that.
…..so raise the age of majority to 25 lmao
this is….SO MUCH bullshit in one post.
the age of adulthood is a social construct. this is such a basic, well understood fact nowadays that it is the foundational concept of entire branches of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and other disciplines, as well as the whole interdisciplinary field of childhood studies (which I happen to have recently finished my PhD in).
adolescence itself is a product of culture at least as much as biology. the entire existence of it. the concept didn’t exist two hundred years ago. there was no such thing as a teenager. and it’s not because people who lived before the age of global industrial capitalism were stupid, it’s because social change over time (and specifically under that global industrial capitalist system) continually pushed back the age at which people were considered “adults”, as well as increasing the number and complexity of things they were expected to accomplish before being perceived as adults. this is still happening and is why we now see this push to conceptualize 18- to 25-year-olds as “not adults”. not because of revelations in psychology.
your brain changes in those years, sure. (it changes throughout the lifespan, but yeah, it changes more before you’re 25.) but two things: first, that change isn’t what you think it is. the brain is – physically – a product of experience. even if you could somehow quantify young people being shit at making decisions because the Decision-Making Brain Section is all weird in the MRIs (which you can’t, and every pop science article with the words “teen brain” in the title is at least somewhat lying to you), the cause of a great deal of that would be the way we treat young people – ie, not letting them ever make a single fucking decision for themselves, and reciting sciency-sounding crap about the prefrontal cortex at them whenever they start to think they might be proper humans.
second, the differences between young brains and older brains that do actually exist and are actually biologically determined are interpreted through such a beyond-bullshit cultural lens it’s all but impossible to see them for what they are. there’s this idea that judgment and reason are “impaired” during this time of life, but that’s a perception based on the ideology that middle-aged adults have the “good” brains, and that anything that deviates from them is “bad” instead of “different”. teens and young adults aren’t wired to be reckless idiots with no capacity for rational thought. how exactly would that have evolved? what fucking selection advantage would that have? what young people’s brains do tend to be wired for is tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty – which is necessary for young members of a highly social, highly adaptable species finding their place in the world! can it lead to bad decisions? sure! at the same time as it helps prevent choice paralysis and mitigates fear of change and enables divergent thinking and experimentation leading to personal growth!
(also, there are plenty of cognitive skills that peak before 25, but conveniently adults never seem to have to be worried about being told that makes them stupid and incompetent and untrustworthy.)
all of this is why the arguments of the “psychologists” you name – developmental psychologists, in the tradition of people like Piaget, whose credibility is not much higher than Freud’s – are meaningless. developmental psych is a discipline with huge systemic problems arising from an insulting, dehumanizing deficit model of the people they study, and from a major ignorance of sociocultural factors involved in their work. Piaget thought he’d discovered the universal formula for child development by talking to a dozen middle-class French families, for fuck’s sake, and his intellectual descendants are not much better. (note: there are people trying to change this and redeem the discipline, but it’s happening slowly, because once theoretical approaches reach the status of orthodoxy they’re hard to shift.)
to put it simply: there is nothing “objective” about whether or not someone is a child. like every other identity binary, the child/adult one is a socially constructed crapshoot where almost no one fully matches up to what any ideology says one or the other is supposed to look like.
now, this does NOT mean there’s no problem with a 16-year-old dating a 30-year-old. but the reason those people shouldn’t be dating isn’t because that young person is biologically programmed to be stupid and can’t be trusted to make decisions with their life and body. it’s because of the enormous, socially-constructed power dynamic between those two people. you can’t have an equal relationship with someone who belongs to a class of people considered above you in every sense. you just can’t. but you know what fuels that power imbalance? shit like this post. this is the exact rhetoric adults use to disempower and dehumanize youth. it’s the rhetoric that’s used to take the right of self-ownership away from young people, and it contributes to abuse. you cannot protect people by taking away their rights, especially on the basis of telling them they’re incapable of making decisions for themselves and they should leave that to the exact category of people most likely to abuse them – the only thing you can accomplish by doing that is to make them more vulnerable.
the problem with a 14-year-old boy being described as a “man” is likewise not that he’s biologically incapable of any form of responsibility, it’s that in a society that views adolescents basically as universally cognitively incompetent and adults as individually responsible for everything that happens to them (both of which are ludicrously wrong), choosing to define someone as a “man” implies that he had a level of responsibility and opportunity that is, in fact, systematically denied to a 14-year-old. this is someone living under all the bullshit systems described in the first half of this rant, and being portrayed as a member of a more privileged category who’s not being socially, economically, and psychologically affected by all that every day. that’s the issue.
as for driving, there’s no reason for the driving age to exist at all, let alone to be higher than it is now. skipping right over the part where teenagers have faster reaction times and better vision, on average, than older adults, we have a damn test to tell us if people are capable of driving safely. we have training for new drivers, and mandatory periods of supervised driving practice. (it’s not a perfect system, but we seem to be okay with the compromise of letting a certain number of incompetent adults through it.) the only reason to not allow people under a certain age to take that test or go through that training – to forbid them to even make the attempt to prove that they are capable or take steps to become more capable – is to keep driving as a privilege for adults. to enforce the binary, enforce young people’s lack of responsibility and competence. there’s this whole concept about how the display of knowledge or skill becomes a “status offense” (something that’s only “wrong” for certain categories of people) if the privileged class wants to believe only they could possibly possess that knowledge or skill. that’s what the driving age is.
also, fuck military recruiting in general.
Reblogged for amazing expert commentary.
@dragon-in-a-fez I totally agree, and my entire field—early education—is based on Piaget and Vigotsky!
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