Adulthood – so soon?
I was reading an article the other day on that well known news website (you guessed it, the one run by the Broken Biscuit Company) which suggests we don’t actually become an adult until we are in our thirties.
The article (read here) cited Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University. He suggests having a fixed line – eighteen in the UK – which defines adulthood is completely absurd. Becoming an adult is something that takes places over roughly a thirty year period. It is only a convenience for the education, health and legal systems to have a definite age after which you become an adult.
My wife and I talked about it and she believes she became an adult when she had her first child. I don’t believe I became one until last year, at the age of sixty-one, when my father passed away.
As I sat in the crematorium, I remember feeling absolutely and utterly isolated, despite being surrounded by family and friends. I have no siblings and I believe that made it worse. There is no one I can now turn to for guidance. I think that is the point at which adulthood began for me.
But this brings me back to becoming an adult and the question of education. If we are not going to reach maturity until we are in our thirties, why are we hell-bent on educating our children at an increasingly earlier age? Soon we will be giving lessons in the womb. We need to let children be children, let them play and explore. There is plenty of time for them to learn formally as they get older. Stop pushing them and then perhaps we will see a society that is less stressed than the one in which we currently live.
As for myself, I may have become an adult, but I have absolutely no intention of growing up.