Well said

I’m sure you are correct. Unfortunately, it’s not something that one person, or one family, can overcome all by itself. It’s sort of like an American bringing up a child in London and hoping the child has an American accent — she can model American pronunciation, tell the child he’s American, etc., but he’s still going to have a British accent. That’s just how accents work.

Similarly, there’s no point in a parent trying to treat a 15-year-old as an adult. With the entire surrounding environment treating him as a kid, he’s almost certainly going to act like a kid. That’s just how enculturation works.

I don’t have a solution. Childhood stretching longer and longer is unfair both to the individuals and to society, but I don’t see a simple way out. Completely revamping our educational system would probably need to be part of it.

Awesome input. You should be writing these posts! =)

You mentioned the phrase “Women can’t understand these matters.” Today, if a man suggested that women might be less equipped to reason about certain topics, it would end his career. But it was a perfectly normal viewpoint 200 years ago, and even women agreed that it was backed by observation and by science.

Our society has a history of wildly underestimating massive groups of people, and the science always follows the speculation. Just as there’s plenty of neuroscience indicating that teen brains are less rational than adult brains, there was no shortage of studies to explain why women and black people were at an intellectual disadvantage.

Strengthening our stereotypes is the fact that people act like they’re expected to. When you read the accounts of black Americans from the slavery era, you can detect a submissive childishness in their tone. It makes sense: Even the slaves would have internalized the opinions of the time, which said that their race was inherently childlike. But with that in mind, maybe we can understand why the Southern Democrats thought they were suited to slavery and in need of a master’s guidance. At the time, their mannerisms reinforced that view. It was only once people *expected* them to be capable, confident, and self-reliant that they convincingly exhibited those qualities. It was only once they were treated as equals that they emerged as such.

In the same vein, I think most adolescents would behave very differently if we offered them the rights and responsibilities of adults. And that’s not just conjecture. In the past, when we had higher expectations for children, they rose to the challenge. Look at the numerous historical examples of teenage scientists, professionals, and soldiers. It seems ridiculous to imagine they’re at the same stage of life as a modern American schoolboy who throws a tantrum when he can’t play video games, but that’s the power of expectations.

It’s not just explicit laws and regulations, either. When they graduate and seek work, for example, they’ll soon see that artificially requiring a particular number of years is a common way to thin the number of applicants for a position. If a job can be done by anyone who knows Java but artificially requires eight years of professional Java experience, they’re ruled out unless they somehow began professional-level coding before they were legally allowed to work. Their age will remove them from consideration.

If and when they secure employment, they’ll notice that older co-workers who are no more productive — and possibly less so — are being paid more and given more perks because they’re experienced. Spending time in a field is useful and does matter, but only because it’s supposed to lead to greater knowledge and skill. We’ve all met someone who has fifteen years of experience but really had one year of experience fifteen times, and someone else with twelve years of experience at screwing up. When “experience” is valued all by itself in a vacuum, it’s just another word for age.

When your classmates get to a team lead position, they may find that older people who are supposed to report to them refuse to take them seriously. The company will probably tolerate this, though it would never tolerate a white person not following a black lead’s instructions or a man not following a female lead’s instructions. The black and female leads would be given a manager’s support, but the young lead will be told to be understanding, to respect them, and to figure it out.

It’s not just work, either. Older people will use “You’re young; you don’t know anything” as an all-purpose trump card to win disputes on everything from politics to pet care. Others will tolerate this and even approve, though they’d never approve of “Women can’t understand these matters” as a conversation-stopper.

Your classmates might care more if they realized that they’ll be dealing with this until at least their mid-thirties.

Interestingly, that’s also the time when our physical and cognitive abilities start to slip noticeably. I have a lot to say about that, but this isn’t my blog.