When Do You Become an Adult?

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
MAY 30, 2012 5:06 AMMay 30, 2012 5:06 am

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

See all Student Opinion

There is an array of opinions as to when a person fully matures. Should the legal age of adulthood be lowered or raised? At what age
do you think you are grown? Is it fair that people can serve in the military and vote at 18, but not buy alcohol until they are 21?
Seven experts expressed their beliefs on the topic in the Room for Debate piece When Do Kids Become Adults?
Neuroscientists now know that brain maturation continues far later into development than had been believed previously. Significant
changes in brain anatomy and activity are still taking place during young adulthood, especially in prefrontal regions that are important
for planning ahead, anticipating the future consequences of ones decisions, controlling impulses, and comparing risk and reward.
Indeed, some brain regions and systems do not reach full maturity until the early or mid-20s. Should this new knowledge prompt us to
rethink where we draw legal boundaries between minors and adults?
Maybe, but its not as straightforward as it seems, for at least two reasons. First, different brain regions and systems mature along
different timetables. There is no single age at which the adolescent brain becomes an adult brain. Systems responsible for logical
reasoning mature by the time people are 16, but those involved in self-regulation are still developing in young adulthood. This is why 16year-olds are just as competent as adults when it comes to granting informed medical consent, but still immature in ways that diminish
their criminal responsibility, as the Supreme Court has noted in several recent cases. Using different ages for different legal boundaries
seems odd, but it would make neuroscientific sense if we did it rationally.
Second, science has never had much of an influence on these sorts of decisions. If it did, we wouldnt have ended up with a society that
permits teenagers to drive before they can see R-rated movies on their own, or go to war before they can buy beer. Surely the maturity
required to operate a car or face combat exceeds that required to handle sexy movies or drinking. Age boundaries are drawn for mainly
political reasons, not scientific ones. Its unlikely that brain science will have much of an impact on these thresholds, no matter what the
science says.
Children are so variable in their growth and the ways in which cultures understand child development are so different, it is futile to
attempt to pin down the right age of majority. The Dutch, for example, allow children to drink at the age of 16 but not to drive until
they are 19. Even if I thought it was a good idea to lower the drinking age and raise the driving age and I do I recognize that the
U.S. would never embrace it.
We should require all 18-year-olds in America to leave home and give a year to society, either in the military or in community-based
projects.
I am more concerned with the issue of maturity than I am with the technical age of majority. Researchers and observers have noted that
while our children are getting brighter (I.Q. scores have been going up for the last two decades), they are relatively immature for their
ages in comparison to earlier generations. Over-protected by their parents and spending vast amounts of time in front of TV, computers
and cellphones (over 50 hours a week by middle adolescence, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation), they are less skilled in the
world, less able to build friendships and function in groups, and more reliant on their parents. Instead of fiddling with the age of
majority, we should encourage our children to grow up, and mandatory service would do just that. We should require all 18-year-olds in
America to leave home and give a year to society, either in the military or in community-based projects like tutoring younger children or
working in retirement homes or the inner city. The result would be a cohort of more mature 19-year-olds who would make better
workers and better citizens.
Students: Tell us when you feel people should have the rights and responsibilities of legal adults. Do you think mandatory service of
some kind is a good idea? Do you consider yourself mature, or adult, right now? Do you think there is a certain age at which people
should be considered adults, or is the whole idea flawed? Do you think the age of majority should be based more on brain science than
on politics?

Is 25 the new cut-off point for adulthood?

By Lucy WallisBBC News
New guidance for psychologists will acknowledge that adolescence now effectively runs up until the age of 25 for the
purposes of treating young people. So is this the new cut-off point for adulthood?
"The idea that suddenly at 18 you're an adult just doesn't quite ring true," says child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, who works at
London's Tavistock Clinic.
"My experience of young people is that they still need quite a considerable amount of support and help beyond that age."
Child psychologists are being given a new directive which is that the age range they work with is increasing from 0-18 to 0-25.
"We are becoming much more aware and appreciating development beyond [the age of 18] and I think it's a really good initiative," says
Antrobus, who believes we often rush through childhood, wanting our youngsters to achieve key milestones very quickly.
Continue reading the main story
Adolescent brain development
consultant clinical psychologist:
We used to think that the brain was fully developed by very early teenagerhood and we now realise that the brain doesn't stop
developing until mid-20s or even early 30s. There's a lot more information and evidence to suggest that actually brain development in
various forms goes on throughout the life span.
Over the course of adolescence the way in which information is processed is dramatically changing, and what new scanning techniques
have shown has enabled us to demonstrate what the neurological changes are.
This is particularly important in terms of social reasoning, planning, problem solving and understanding. So the brain is reorganising
itself, which then means that different thinking strategies are used as your brain becomes more like an adult brain.
The prefrontal cortex is the key area that has the most interesting changes in adolescence, so if you do functional MRI studies with
children and adolescents and adults, you see differences in the way that they process information.
The new guidance is to help ensure that when young people reach the age of 18 they do not fall through the gaps in the health and
education system. The change follows developments in our understanding of emotional maturity, hormonal development and
particularly brain activity.
"Neuroscience has made these massive advances where we now don't think that things just stop at a certain age, that actually there's
evidence of brain development well into early twenties and that actually the time at which things stop is much later than we first
thought," says Antrobus.
There are three stages of adolescence - early adolescence from 12-14 years, middle adolescence from 15-17 years and late
adolescence from 18 years and over.
Neuroscience has shown that a young person's cognitive development continues into this later stage and that their emotional maturity,
self-image and judgement will be affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed.
Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties says Antrobus.
"A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great
that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception," says Antrobus.
Continue reading the main story

The solution to not having useless 30-year-olds living at home is to make them do their own washing, pay their own way
TV property expert Sarah Beeny
She says that some adolescents may want to stay longer with their families because they need more support during these formative
years and that it is important for parents to realise that all young people do not develop at the same pace.
But is there any danger we could be breeding a nation of young people reluctant to leave adolescence behind?
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.
Then there are those characters who want to break away from their overbearing or protective parents or guardians and reach
adulthood, but struggle to cut the family ties.
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says we have infantilised young people and this has led to a growing
number of young men and women in their late 20s still living at home.
"Often it's claimed it's for economic reasons, but actually it's not really for that," says Furedi. "There is a loss of the aspiration for
independence and striking out on your own. When I went to university it would have been a social death to have been seen with your
parents, whereas now it's the norm.
Neil gets a surprise visit from his parents in The Young Ones
"So you have this kind of cultural shift which basically means that adolescence extends into your late twenties and that can hamper you
in all kinds of ways, and I think what psychology does is it inadvertently reinforces that kind of passivity and powerlessness and
immaturity and normalises that."
Furedi says that this infantilised culture has intensified a sense of "passive dependence" which can lead to difficulties in conducting
mature adult relationships. There's evidence of this culture even in our viewing preferences.
"There's an increasing number of adults who are watching children's movies in the cinema," says Furedi. "If you look at children's TV
channels in America, 25% of the viewers are adults rather than children."
He does not agree that the modern world is far more difficult for young people to navigate.
"I think that what it is, is not that the world has become crueller, it's just that we hold our children back from a very early age. When
they're 11, 12, 13 we don't let them out on their own. When they're 14, 15, we hover all over them and insulate them from real-life
experience. We treat university students the way we used to treat school pupils, so I think it's that type of cumulative effect of
infantilisation which is responsible for this."

But should parents really be encouraging adolescents to make their own way in the world more? The TV series Girls - with central
character Hannah Horvath struggling with adulthood - has captured the zeitgeist. Hannah's parents have cut her off financially and she
has to live away and navigate her 20s making her own mistakes.
Should adolescents have to make it on their own like the cast of Girls?
One of the traditional rites of passage for adulthood was always leaving home, but TV property expert Sarah Beeny says that
adolescents do not have to move out of the parental house in order to learn how to be independent and there are huge advantages to
multi-generational living.
"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.
She says that parents should play a part in teaching adolescents key skills and that young people in return can keep their parents
current.
Continue reading the main story
Teach these children [safe driving skills] before they've been corrupted by Grand Theft Auto 5 and Top Gear
Motoring expert Quentin Willson
"I know it sounds like a utopian dream but it's probably where we should be aiming. To me that's the holy grail not everybody living in
their own individual pods by themselves thinking, brilliant I'm paying a mortgage."
The idea of parental responsibility to adolescents should also extend to another external symbol of maturity says motoring expert
Quentin Willson - the car. He says it has become a "talisman" for young people to feel more mature.
Willson says statistics show that at the age of 18 the vast majority of accidents caused by young drivers are down to bad judgement
and decision making, and that behind the wheel "adult maturity isn't fully formed until you get past 25 for most cases of people".
But rather than raise the minimum age for driving, Willson believes parents and teachers should impart safe driving skills before the
effects of adolescence really kick in.
"If you teach these children when their mindsets are pure and before they've been corrupted by things like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Top
Gear and all these corrosive social pressures, then you get the road safety message in much earlier," says Willson.

"The government should look at this very carefully and put driving on the GCSE syllabus. So you teach kids to
drive in terms of theory at school and all the right messages at 13, 14, 15, because when you get to 17 the
testosterone is raging, all those corrosive influences are embedded."
With such racing hormonal activity and adolescence taking much longer than we previously thought, how will
we know when we actually do reach adulthood?
For Antrobus it is when independence "feels like something that you both want and can acquire".
But for the eternal adolescents among us, perhaps Beeny's definition is apt.
"For me adulthood is realising that there are no grown-ups and everyone else is winging it," says Beeny.