Hacker News Reader

Comment by double_nan | Hacker News Reader

I’m mostly curious about why the maturity period was prolonged by 5-10 years from what the human race had 100 or 1000 years ago. I’m not talking about education but the transition from youths to adulthood.

View on HN

As the world becomes more complex, childhood understandably gets longer.

Because we continue to gain a better understanding of how people mature. We now recognize that the period of adolescence is a long one, and that life outcomes are typically better when you do not push people directly into adult roles in society immediately after they reach puberty.

Science seems to be pointed hard towards 25 being the age of majority rather than 18. We are unlikely to see the age move in our lifetimes due to the military needing its recruits but it probably should. Do you really think the average 14-15 year old should be considered in the same maturity bracket as the average 35 or 45 year old? I was incapable of making good decisions at that age. The things I thought were cool, the way I thought things worked, the rational for the actions I took, all of it was cringe inducing now as an adult when I think back on it. When I think back on my 30's, I wish I had more information but overall see no fault in the way that I made my decisions.

Fluid intelligence is already in decline by 25. If between the credentialist impulse and the infantilizing impulse we push career starts inexorably towards 30 the human race is going to miss out on a lot of contributions that we need to help solve our many problems across many fields of endeavor.

I could not come up with a better argument for reducing the age of majority to 13 or 14 if I tried. Infantilising adults like this is dehumanising.

I mostly agree with the maturity argument and because of that all the attempts to push more decision making (like voting) on younger people seem strange to me. But the most curious topic for me at the moment is why we are lowering our expectations for 18-25 years old. We used to see them as young but fully capable adults (granted that is a shift from 14-16 years from 100-1000 years ago). I understand the educational part of the argument as well but some of the trends seems very strange to me. For example: as far as I understand there is no strong expectation that ppl after high school know what they want to do and it’s normal to take 1-2 years break between school and college. Is it a new thing? I don’t really know. But I can’t find comparable breaks in history or other (less wealthy) societies. Health insurance cut off dates are 21 (25?) years old. University system seems more and more similar to a nice place to spend time (better dorms before better classes) than to the place to efficiently receive your education.

Playing devil's advocate: If we are considering maturity as a pre-requisite to vote, perhaps we should test for that? Some 15 years olds are very mature, and some 30+ years olds are not.

Also, maybe it is wrong to disenfranchise immature people. They are people, too.

In 1922, a 14-year-old in the US could expect to live maybe another 40 years; in 2022, that number is likely to be at least 70. As a fraction of life expectancy, adolescence is actually relatively short right now.

Do you have a citation for that? I’m not sure it’s correct (although I don’t have any links of my own handy either, sorry!)

My impression was that infant mortality was a great deal higher back then, but there wasn’t as big a disparity after that as people tend to assume. People didn’t hit old age in their 50s and 60s, they often lived into their 80s and beyond, just like today.

Quality of life over quantity should be a metric somehow. Sure the internet and access for more people should raise the bar, but I am not sure about that. A lot of noise out there. Yes, an average life expectancy of 78 years in the US, sounds like a lot compared to around 60 in the 1920s, but with a current obesity prevalence of over 40% (obesity and severe obesity) in the US, I am not sure we can gauge a year-for-a-year in this comparison. And people wonder why an advanced country such as the US can get hit so bad by COVID, and blame it on each other, when over 70% of deaths and serious hospitalizations are linked to obesity. I think we can allow children to mature as early as they seem to be able to take it on, and not over pressure them while doing this; isn't that what being a parent is all about - assessing and nurturing together? I certainly had to grow up quick living below or at the poverty line in a bad neighborhood in my childhood and all that entailed, along with my relatives sent at age 18 to 22 to Korea, Vietnam, and other wars that followed. Children who grew/grow up on farms with chores and responsibilities and with similar corollaries in cities at an early age sounds better to me than coddling them into their mid-twenties, but that is my opinion from the various young people I have interviewed and worked with in white-collar and blue-collar jobs (construction, diving, ropework, machining, welding, etc...) as well as to the older and younger children I have raised in my family.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com