Is 25 the new cut-off point for adulthood? | Hacker News Reader

Is 25 the new cut-off point for adulthood?

bbc.co.uk

41 pointssimonbrown55 comments

""The solution to not having useless 25 [and] 30-year-olds living at home is not sending them out of the home, it's making them do their own washing, pay their own way, pay towards the rent, pay towards the bills, to take responsibility for cleaning up their bedroom and not waiting on them hand and foot," says Beeny."

Two great conflicts in parenthood, wanting the best for your child, and being responsible for their pain. My wife had my kids doing their own laundry by 11. Its pretty simple to do, there are Sharpie (permanent ink) marks on the washer and drier for the 'normal' settings, we made sure they only got clothes that could be washed on normal settings until they were 14. Sure they wear smelly stuff some days, but nobody likes to smell bad, even kids. They figure it out.

Lots of times explaining what we weren't going to do for them because they were now old enough to do for themselves. For a while everyone cooked dinner for the whole family one night a week, we rotated nights. Wife would shop for the ingredients, they did the cooking. Everyone else would work on cleanup. Some nights we had sandwiches :-). Lots of "easy" recipes were learned, mac-n-cheese, pasta and marinara sauce, any vegetable boiled, or cooked in a skillet. And some not so easy things, like pot pies, rolls, spinach souffle.

I know this won't work for everyone, it was reasonably successful in our peers but there are always individuals who need direct attention. The challenge is trying to guess when to flip from letting them suffer the consequences and jumping in to help.

I remember freshman year in college my roommates thought I was some sort of wizard just because I was comfortable cooking ground beef, throwing together hamburgers, or spaghetti and sauce or whatever. Easy stuff, and they could obviously manage it, but they weren't confident since it was something new to them. If nothing else, teaching your kids to at least not be utterly baffled by a kitchen is a good idea.

I never had to do laundry until I moved out at 18. And when I finally did have to do my laundry, it wasn't exactly a painful struggle. It probably took 5 minutes to learn.

I may even be able to argue that since my parents did my laundry, washed my dishes, and never gave me chores, I had extra free time to explore on the computer and teach myself how to program.

There is nothing quite so true as 'everyone is different' however you were ahead of the game when you wrote "until I moved out." If you read the article you'll see that folks who don't move out are more likely to be not quite ready to function as adults.

Going a bit deeper, that you did move suggests that you weren't worried about your ability to 'handle it' and where that confidence came from varies from person to person as well.

Laundry is of course easy to learn, but the issue at hand here is the question of empowering youth to feel capable. I have no fears about tackling the unknown and learning how to cook and do laundry, and presumably neither do you. Some young adults however do, and the theory here is that teaching them these basic life skills will help them get over the fear of striking out alone.

Yea but I feel that is a lack of pushing or pressure, rather than lack of long-term development.

That's awesome :-)

My parents had me doing chores so when I moved out, I had those life skills. I'll admit, it wasn't until after I was 25 that I wanted to get my shit together to break free; it wasn't until I was 28 until I was trying to strike it on my own. But it wasn't until a few months ago, at age 33, that I truly felt like a mature adult.

By that I mean that, there were no hidden impostor syndrome. Nor were there hidden motives in attempting to accomplish something in order to get parental approval.

Although at 25, I did feel start feeling changes (as a result of a maturing brain), none of what led up to feeling like an adult came as a result of a maturing body, or depending on society to create a path towards adulthood. Part of that is mentoring. A lot of it was inner work. (But you can't make anyone do inner work).

Reminds me of an incident that happened not too long ago, with my daughter. She got the dog's food from the bowl and started throwing it out on the floor. I told her to stop it, and then she started walking away, slightly dejected. I then told her to clean it up, and she turned around, and starting putting each little piece in the bowl again. She's a few months shy of two years old, but I was pretty proud of her. After she sat there a minute picking up the pieces, I came in and helped her out, but I made sure she continued working.

Did you talk to her about why she shouldn't throw it out? All my kids were different, and I found that rules by fiat never worked for me, but discussions about what we were trying to achieve where more successful. When they were very young, we didn't talk about things so much as we read books with stories and we talked about the stories. Things like Bread and Jam for Frances or Pancakes for Breakfast. I found toddlers to be great observers, and not so great at reasoning :-).

> Lots of times explaining what we weren't going to do for them because they were now old enough to do for themselves. For a while everyone cooked dinner for the whole family one night a week, we rotated nights. Wife would shop for the ingredients, they did the cooking. Everyone else would work on cleanup. Some nights we had sandwiches :-). Lots of "easy" recipes were learned, mac-n-cheese, pasta and marinara sauce, any vegetable boiled, or cooked in a skillet. And some not so easy things, like pot pies, rolls, spinach souffle.

Great on you for doing this. I was coddled till I was 15 and suddenly I had to live all alone in a foreign country (owing to shitty circumstances at home). Stressing out about homework whilst having to deal with laundry and cooking was not a fun thing to learn to do at the same time!

I got married at 21 to a girl I'd been dating for 6 years. We moved off to our own rented place a year before that when we started college. At that point we were supposed to be adults but a lot of the time it just felt like we were playing house. We constantly had bills coming due that we couldn't pay, we struggled to eat, and I even sold my own vehicle at a $9,000 loss once to pay half of our over-due rent.

It was a nightmare that lasted about...4 years...but things slowly got better.

We each graduated with our B.A.s (barely) and went on to complete Master's degrees with high marks (her a 4. 0 and me a 3.9) and each with glowing recommendations from our professors and colleagues.

Along the way we have made horrible mistakes, learned tons of really hard lessons, and become better people for it.

I don't know if I can pinpoint any specific time that we "became adults." But I know that we are each closer now than we were when we first got married. But from conversations with our families, our story isn't all that different from my parents or hers, or our grandparents. The main difference is that our families had the ability to help us through the darkest times, where as their families did not. And I think that is one reason that it may seem like the "age of adulthood" has become extended: people usually adapt pretty well to their situations. So, when my grandfather was married at 19 and he had to feed his family he didn't have anyone to count on for help. I knew I could always ask for help if I needed to (although it made me hate myself when I did). So, it took longer to become independent because I wasn't forced to do so by my situation.

Not sure if that is normal for most people, but it's how it was for us.

The cut-off keeps getting later and later.

And that's because the cut-off is not biological, it's social. If you give people adult responsibilities they act like adults. Except people want to wait till they are already adults to do that, leading to a Catch-22.

You can't act like an adult till you are one, but you won't become one till you act like one.

So the age keeps getting later and later. In my opinion by 15 or 16 people should already be expected to act like adults. And don't tell me about the 15 year olds you know who act like babies - that's simply because that's how they are treated.

>that's simply because that's how they are treated.

Bingo! By forcing kids to go to school through 18 where they make basically NO choices that affect their lives, are taught things that more than half the time the teachers can't even tell them why they need to know them ("for college" isn't a real answer, either) -- all of this treats them like infants.

Even infants manage learn to speak and walk without being "taught" a thing. Forcing kids to go through a lock-step learning regimen just teaches them that their desires aren't important, and they end up rebelling.

If you look at kids from Sudbury schools [1], or kids who have been (competently) "Unschooled" [2], they typically seem to be mature for their age, polite, and reasonably well-spoken. By respecting the kids and giving them freedom at a young age, they act more mature.

See also Paul Graham's essay on "Nerds" [3], where he talks about (among other things) the completely artificial environment that is the broken schooling paradigm in the US, and in much of the world.

>In my opinion by 15 or 16 people should already be expected to act like adults.

If you treat them that way, for real, then they will. But that includes not forcing them into the stupidly artificial and even actively damaging [4].

Someday I want to fix this problem. If I end up involved in a start-up, fixing education -- REALLY fixing it, not just doing "more of the same" and calling that an improvement -- will be at the core.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

[2] http://sandradodd.com/unschooling -- briefly, the kids are allowed to learn what they want. This is NOT just "neglect the kids;" it requires active parent involvement.

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

[4] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3d.htm -- see the note about dyslexia

> And that's because the cut-off is not biological, it's social.

I disagree. There is a wealth of biological evidence to show that a human's brain doesn't finish maturing until (approx.) age 25. By that standard you could make the argument that 25 is when people reach adulthood.

Of course, what we're really talking about here is expectations of responsibility, so even though "by 15 or 16 people should already be expected to act like adults" these young people still have maturing to do.

It's not surprising that in our rich modern society the age of 'adulthood' has risen to 25, especially considering we live so much longer than we used to.

Why is the definition of adulthood "finish maturing"? If anything that should be middle age, i.e. in the middle of adulthood, not the start of it.

By your definition as soon as someone becomes an adult they start degrading in mental ability. The peak of mental ability should match the middle of the productive years.

But in any case the maturity of the brain is not just biologically controlled - it's environmentally controlled. The brain of someone treated like an adult will be more mature than that of someone teated like a child.

The brain responds to stimulus, it doesn't really have a pre-programmed makeup. It has basic abilities, but that ones that are expressed are the ones that it needs/uses.

All fair points, but I never defined adulthood, only disagreed with the parent which stated "the cut-off is not biological, it's social". Of course there are social factors as well as biological. I'm sure I'm not qualified to form such a definition, though if I tried it would have to include many factors.

I, for example, moved out of my parents' house at 18, but I wouldn't say I became an 'adult' until at least my early 30's. Even now I feel like a kid most of the time, in spite of my many responsibilities - even with a kid of my own!

I don't think we ever finish maturing, and I think we never stop learning, even though our 'peak' mental ability may come and go.

There is also a wealth of biological evidence to show that a human's brain and body start deteriorating significantly before age 25; you can pick and choose the evidence that supports the conclusion you want.

In practice, our supposedly rich modern society is becoming mentally unhealthy to a degree that increasingly outweighs the material gains of recent generations; mental illness is common, suicide has become a major cause of death among young people, birthrate has crashed below extinction level. We can fix what we are doing wrong - a large part of which is treating young people like prize animals in gilded cages - or our society can end up in Darwin's bit bucket. We can decide which of these options we prefer, but I don't see the universe giving us the option of "neither".

http://rationalconspiracy.com/2012/09/10/age-and-brain-devel...

Can't trust that graph because the x axis doesn't start at 0 ;)

A valid objection, but is it really meaningful to talk about intelligence of toddlers in the same context as intelligence of other people? I mean, they're still figuring out that they have hands, and that they control them.

No, it was sarcasm.

> There is a wealth of biological evidence to show that a human's brain doesn't finish maturing until (approx.) age 25

"Finish maturing" as in "can no longer teach the old dog new tricks"? Even more reason to give them practice in adult skills before then IMO

> by 15 or 16 people should already be expected to act like adults.

I think that's the age where an apprenticeship should begin. It's time to go back to the old ways and actually give people a real skill for when they do become adults.

I'm going to sound like an old codger here, which is a strange experience for a 28 year old, let me tell you. Bear with me, I'm not going to tell anyone to get off my lawn...

No, biologically people are adults at puberty. That marks a sea change where, among all sorts of other changes, people stop maturing based on time and so, from then on, primarily mature based on experience.

What we're seeing here is the steady march of a feedback loop that began when the terms 'teenager' and 'adolescent' appeared. Those terms represent a meme that has changed where the dividing line between someone being a 'child' and an 'adult' lies. Before, people aged 11-19 were adults. Young, inexperienced adults, but adults nonetheless.

Then teenager-hood was invented as a phase of life and the line began creeping upwards. They were no longer adults; now they were old children: not yet responsible for themselves and their actions.

The feedback loop comes from removing opportunities to gain life experience: treating someone aged X like a child means that they will gain less experience and therefore mature less by age X+1. If this happens to a whole cohort, it means that people aged X+1 will start looking more like children, which will cause older generations to treat them as children. Then the cycle repeats at age X+2 in a new cohort.

Apparently today, we're seeing the line creep into the early 20s.

biologically people are adults at puberty

If you define "adulthood" as "the age of sexual maturity", then yes. However, if you define it as "when the individual is finished developing", adulthood truly begins somewhere in the early to mid twenties. Your brain continues to develop after puberty.

Adulthood depends a lot on the economic circumstances around you. There are lots of 14 year old adults in developing countries.

There are definitely neurological and biological changes that are time-driven after puberty.

As is forgetfulness and senility as we get older. Doesn't mean we dumb down the definition of adulthood and continue to infantilize people so they can live in their parent's basement til age 30.

Yes, clearly my correction of a factual claim means I support the opposing side to an absurd degree.

Am I the only one who is instinctively skeptical about any discussion of "adulthood", "responsibility", and "maturity"? Although some aspects of adulthood are obviously good (paying your bills on time), these words often seem to also mean "willingness to conform".

I recently moved from San Francisco to South Carolina. San Francisco is often derided as a city of eternal adolescence, whose residents still live with multiple roommates, party at odd hours, switch jobs often, don't think too much about the distant future, and disvalue stability. In contrast, traditional adulthood is alive and well in South Carolina. There's a counterculture, but overall SC is much closer to Leave It To Beaver.

SC has some merits, but personally I'd take SF over SC any day of the week. It is more fun, and it's also contributing much more to technological and cultural advancement, the creation of wealth, and the economy overall.

The lifestyle you describe in San Francisco is unsustainable over the long run for most people. This is one reason why that lifestyle is considered to be more adolescent: it is not realistic for the average middle class person to maintain that lifestyle while having a family and eventually retiring comfortably.

San Francisco the city is eternally adolescent, but the people there are not. There are few long-term residents, and most people who move into the city will eventually move out because it is outrageously expensive (and it's not a great environment for kids: it's very dirty, not particularly safe, the public schools are generally terrible, etc.). That six figure salary is not doing you much good when your small and cramped house is well over $1M, you're paying $1500/month in daycare, you eventually are paying $25k+/year for private schools (not college), and you're hit by high income taxes before you even start making all those payments.

South Carolina is a place where people are less constrained financially. If you want to settle down with a family and a house, you can probably afford to do so if you're middle class and up. You could also probably afford to party all the time. What's interesting to me is that in the presence of choice we see people tend towards the former rather than the latter.

What's interesting to me is that in the presence of choice we see people tend towards the former rather than the latter.

Partying all the time sounds awesome when you are 19, after which it begins to slowly lose its luster.

To my eyes, most of these discussions of "adulthood" focus on "self-reliance", or rather a lack thereof.

As someone born and raised in the South and now an SF resident, you will find that the South is often very structured and conservative. SF != South, by almost any measure.

That said, you're comparing apples to oranges, somewhat, too. A small-to-mid-sized metro area compared to SF is very different. I think the characteristics you listed to describe SF are popular in NYC, as well.

When people domesticate animals to be pets infantile traits become prevalent in mature specimens. It's possible that this might be happening to humans as well. We consistently are becoming less violent http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

Infantile traits such as imaginativeness and playfulness become selected for in environment changing faster than ever.

Cut-off point to adulthood is completely arbitrary and cultural. Attempting to motivate it with science is bizarre. So what if brain and body changes from 18 to 25? It also changes from 25 to 35 and so on.

I think it's bit of a myth that you take some time (18 years or so) to reach your final form that then gradually deteriorates. I believe it's a continuous process and there's no final form (unless you mean it to be gray haired, wrinkled corpse in a casket).

My parents gave me total freedom at 14, and thanks to that I created my first company at age 15, traveled around the world, start paying my own bills and now that I'm 17 I am totally independent living on my own rented apartment. So it all depends on the freedom you give to your sons to actually start building their own way.

Complicated.

While I understand the whole social push of "be more mature", I think there's something to be said of having a healthy carefree childhood & young-adult-funtime. I think 18 is fine if only because society supports this cutoff. Since you can get in trouble with the law like an "adult" at 18, you better understand consequences by then. Personally, I think there's plenty of time to figure out adulthood(barring horrible life-changing mistakes) but losing out on your childhood & young-adult years is a greater loss than not being "mature" by 25. But that's just my viewpoint, to put some context around it I think the people who condemn shows like the jersey shore are (sub)consciously jealous they couldn't live life that way or somehow lost out on their childhood/young-adult-funtime and think their speedy rise to "maturity" is something everyone should strive for. I told my wife that if I ever won the lottery, like the powerbowl's 400 million, I'd travel all over the world following all the Hed Kandi parties. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyJ7He58rcE . Is partying all day & night "mature"? I don't know, but it's fun!

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, brain scans seem to show that development of the frontal lobe (planning, foresight, organization) continues through the mid-20s, especially in males. On the other, people throughout history seem to have been perfectly capable of handling themselves by their late teen years. Are our brains developing more slowly now? Is our world now so complex that it takes a fully-developed brain to make sense of it? Or are we just big whiners?

Could be that we're just going through biological changes because of a different diet. Seems to change the age of puberty.

The modern world is more complicated and difficult to navigate. It is also increasingly abstract and we don't (collectively) do a great job with helping our youth really understand the connection between those abstractions and reality.

My father got paid in cash for many years while in the Army. Today, a lot of employers require you to have a bank account and only pay by direct deposit. My oldest son likely has dyscalculia. Kind of like a dyslexic doesn't deal well with reading, he doesn't deal well with numbers. I gave him cash and made him do the household grocery shopping for a while. It helped him wrap his brain around budgeting.

Now he can cope with a debit card but that would have been a disaster if we had skipped that first step of helping understand in very concrete terms the relationship between money and material quality of life. I think a lot of young people get a bank account, get their paycheck deposited and just cannot relate these abstract numbers to the need to eat all month, among other things.

"TV sitcoms are littered with such comic stereotypes of juvenile adults, such as Smithy from Gavin and Stacey or Private Pike in Dad's Army."

As a non-Brit, I enjoy the completely opaque cultural references in BBC news articles. Although thanks to Netflix I have seen Gavin & Stacey.

Well, it's not like American news sources don't assume everybody has an American pop culture either...

I'll believe 25 is the new 18 when we raise the minimum age for military service from 18 to 25.

...on the other hand, if you're in the US you can't buy alcohol until you're 21.

This is interesting to factor in, too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_Un...

They mention car accidents as a statistic that drops off after the age of 25 (I only briefly skimmed the article).

I have thought for a long time: leave it to the insurance companies/number crunchers to best predict when "maturity" sets in (at least for the average young adult). The fact that you can't rent cars until the age 25 always suggested to me that the insurance companies had run the numbers and pin pointed this age as when it is "safe" to trust someone with their assets.

When there are legitimate business interests at stake (read: $$$$) they tend to get this stuff right.

You can in fact rent cars before the age of 25, but they charge a hefty premium. Source: I rented a car 2 weeks shy of 25 years old. There was an additional $80 fee per day.

That premium is there to cover the additional risk they have identified is associated with renting to people under the age of 25.

Is this leading towards an upwards adjustment of the legal age of majority? I think Tolkien had it right with the hobbits' "tweenies", but the last thing we need to do is set it as law.

It takes awhile, once you're finally allowed behind the wheel, to develop a sure hand and a discerning eye for steering the course of your own life. That's going to be true no matter where they set the age below which you're not allowed to drive yourself. Better it be when the brain still has the described plasticity so the needed life-lessons are learned well.

So if 25 is the new cutoff for adulthood, and 30 is the new BS cutoff for an employable programmer, that leaves 5 years to learn everything?

People who aren't adults can learn things. Indeed, that's a pretty important function of the non-adult portion of life.

If I shave I bet I can still pass for 30...

I know people in their early 30's who shouldn't be considered adults. They're perpetual students, have never held a real job (meaning, one that would actually support their lifestyle), have rich parents who bail them out of everything. Basically, they are overgrown teenagers.

Does being an adult just mean being old? There are 24 year olds with more responsibility, money, skill, influence, and intelligence than people older than that. Of course they're adults.

I was gonna write something longer, but I decided against it. What I wanted to say is: I'm in my 16th year of school, so to speak. Going to some kind of learning institution for such a long time might seem like a continuation of childhood, but I don't know: since I started university I've had no one but myself to blame for any of my academic achievements. When it comes down to it, all I'm left with is my brains, an exam paper and the cold student identification number written on that exam paper. I guess at least in some ways, I would say that I've learnt some self discipline.

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