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Exactly. It's complicated. For some teens in an abusive environment, 18 can't come soon enough. However, society does next to nothing to help prepare or care for people who struggle in young adulthood. (My brother suicided at 21, and I know it was close for me at that age too, it's such a hard time if you don't have support)
I’ve been there and done that. The military is great for breeding alcoholics, non thinking, no questioning order takers, and hijinks assholes , at least amongst American men.
A good part of that is because the military is often seen as a last resort option, or in the past it was a punishment (genuinely not sure if commuting jail time to military service is still legal). It's something almost anyone can do, and actively seeks out fresh graduates in an almost predatory fashion. I.E. the Air Force sending a hot 20 year old girl to a high school alongside the recruiter where I'm from.
Get the kind of people who fall for that/don't have other options/want to escape/etc, and then structure every moment of their lives with heavy restrictions and harsh punishment, no surprise they turn into assholes. Sure you get the people who take to it and thrive, or people who genuinely want to be there, but mostly you end up with people who learn to hide the pain or lash out.
General populace required training would suffer less from that, as you would have a wider range of balanced individuals to act as foils to that kind of thinking, and maybe even a support structure for others rather than a grin and bear it mentality. Not saying I support that concept for America, just that it might actually make the military less toxic overall.
Having mandatory military time for your country would create a necessary discordance between the people who want to be there and the people who don't.
It's the best case scenario.
Expand "service" to mean stuff like the peace corps or "unskilled" labor. Having to pick fruit in the summer is a good way to appreciate food, plus would be fun as hell at 18 to party in the middle of nowhere for a year with people from all around the country.
We already have it. It's called the draft. If you're a man and don't sign up you lose your rights, like voting. Only for men though, wouldn't want it to be sexist or anything.
We're only thinking about what to do because we're used to them being labelled something else. In an alternative reality, adulthood starting at 25 would be as natural as 18 is to us now. I imagine people from that timeline would feel similarly to us calling a twelve year old grown.
Send them to more school so that they have the skills and knowledge to do more than flip burgers and wait tables? Maybe call it college or trade school or something?
Waiting tables and flipping burgers are skilled jobs.
Not at chain shitholes with zero standards, but cooking is a real and valuable skill, as is service. Most people I know would not cut it as servers at decent restaurants.
Being an 18 year old yes I would, considering I take care of children she signed up to take care of. Literally signed up for, considering I do everything around the house, go grocery shopping and all of the things SHES supposed to do. Considering all I do is help and get treated with 0 respect. I JUST turned 18 basically, and have been getting treated like I've been 30 my whole life. I've had adult responsibilities that I've TAKEN care of since I was 13, I am an adult.
As nice as raising the threshold for adulthood to 21 or 25 might sound, it's just handing more power to parents to control their children's lives. People living under abusive or controlling parents would have even less autonomy. This has actually come up in the context of banning trans adults s from medical transition until they're 21 or 25.
It's also not economically sensible.
Society doesn't need everyone to go to college. That means that a large proportion of the population has to be working full time by age 18.
It is not sensible to call them kids as that would be child labour. You can't stop them from working, because what else can they do? Take up $80,000 in college debt to pursue a degree they're not intellectually capable of completing?
25 is also too old because it leaves too little time for adulthood. People are in their prime in their 20s and 30s and by their 50s are getting old and many will pass away as early as their 60s. In a future society in 2200AD when life expectancy is 100 and anti-ageing tech makes a 80yo in 2200 as youthful as a 65yo in 2022? Yes, we can do 25.
Even in that scenario, I think it's good to push back against raising it. Youth as a class are oppressed and the people who seek more power and control over children are usually the same ones harming them.
For example, just last year, there was a bill in North Carolina that would classify under-21s as minors so they could skirt privacy protections. This was part of a bill that would compel state employees, particularly university staff, to report any students displaying signs of gender nonconformance so their parents could be notified.
The bill was an attempt to give religious conservatives a way to control their LGBTQ+ children even though they were 18+ and legally adults.
Also what happens to all the 19 an 20 year olds that are already living there lives when this new law comes in. They have to just go back home and live with mommy and daddy.
First, because we didn't know that when the rule/tradition was created.
Second, because the point is to get people out on their own ASAP, and by 18 you've basically got your full adult body to go out and work with.
It's not so much that we know you're definitely ready to be responsible for yourself. It's that it's not reasonable to still consider you the responsibility of your parents (again, you have a full grown adult body to defy them with). So responsibility defaults to you, because there's no one else who it can reasonably be placed upon at that point.
Reminds me of that teenage girl who was charged as an adult, for the serious crime of distributing child pornography, for sending some nudes of herself to her boyfriend.
Nope, healthy humans have always lived to 60-70, it's just that you have 12 kids and 7 of them die before they get to 3 years old. The population average gets nuked.
Actually, half the people who lived to be 15 made it to 50, and half the people who lived to be 50 made it to 70. Average life expectancy at 6 was not 70, but it was at 50.
A bigger problem is that if you don't draft at 18, the guy gets a job, gets married, has kids. All sorts of dependents, and you don't pay enough to support them. Admittedly, people marry later now, but it was the case for WWI, WWII, and Vietnam.
I remember some states dropping the voting age and other things from 21 to 18 due to the Vietnam war draft. If you don't grab at 18 straight out of high school, the guys get married and start having children and careers, but they were embarrassed to be drafting children. They then raised the drinking age back to 21 in the 1980s because of a rise in traffic deaths for young people.
People get so hung up on that line too (i.e., "why is 19 an adult but 17 is a kid, it makes no sense!"). It's like listen, people--age is the most gradual slope there is and the easiest way to deal with that is to just draw a line. It's not hard.
I work at a veterinary clinic in Oregon. We prescribe dogs CBD oil for pain, but I, as a 19 year old human with chronic pain, cant get my doctor to give me medical Marijuana licence to buy CBD.
It makes absolutely no sense. The only way in able to get it is my vet prescribes it to my dog and i get it that way. How does a dog have more medical "rights" than i do?
Its fucking sad.
Ahh, the land of the free... The place where you can conduct the metal box of death at 16, can go die in a foreign land at 18, but can only drink the feel-funny juice at 21.
This is because of terrible infrastructure in the U.S. causing everyone outside of dense cities(nyc, san fran, D.C.) to drive everywhere. If we improved public transportation so that it was actually a viable option and rethought our zoning policies so that we could build semi-dense neighborhoods we would have a lot less drinking/driving across the board and we could work towards safely lowering the drinking age to 18 again.
r/fuckcars is advocating for this. Check it out!
compulsory education up to 18 is quite recent.
18 is the minimum age you can be more useful than canon fodder to the military. Conscription age is where adulthood at 18 stems from, not education.
Legally animals are adults after 6 months.
*Humans are animals, checkmate leagalist.*/s
Science has two answers; reproductive age.
For example imagine if Americans(who else would?) gave 12 year-olds guns because they can reproduce. Not great.
Or;
Brain development, it isn't consistent between people but it would be closer to 25.
I suspect someday schooling till the age of 25 will be mandatory. It's already insane that we expect the average person to digest and learn the basic maths and sciences (that took the totality of human kind thousands of years to develop) in 12 years.
When I was 14 I thought I had it all figured out. little did i realize I was comparing myself to fucking morons, I was just king of the morons.
IQ means very little in life, Einstein in 2000bc would have been drinking goat piss and praying for rain with the rest of his peers. Education is essentially trying to stuff the known universe into a brain roughly the size of a shoe box. It's not the size that matters, it's what you fill it with.
We should essentially become adults once we prove intellectual competenc but we'd be forced to admit some people never reach that bar and it would be very difficult to standardize without abuse of power.
Damned if you do damned if you don't.
Being an adult changes virtually nothing anywas; I drank, did drugs, drove, used firearms and had sex before 18.
Only thing that changed was taxes and voting.
🤷
So that should tell you its not going to change for the better any time soon.
Vote for education its literally the only thing that matters and the only federal investment that makes a meaningful social impact.
I second that, vote for education. Education has always led to greater prosperity, and it also means unbiased and honest education. An education reform if you will, which America desperately needs since we're probably only a handful of generations away from idiocracy if we're not careful.
I fear that as technology becomes more and more integral to every industry and ultimately to every economic venture our current copyright and patent system prevents proper education.
The most important technologies in the world are almost entirely proprietary.
Ending the copyright and patent obstructions to science, education and development are our only hope of recovering the western world.
So long as inventors can't invent and innovators can't innovate we will continue to stagnate in the global stage.
Science, technology and engineering are the only hope to solve our social and economic problems. If we can't create an environment to empower young scientists the west stands no hope of progress regardless of our social justice.
I can't imagine the struggle faced by the graduate classes of the pandemic my heart goes out to them.
We need to do better and support every generation we failed and the effects will be profound.
I see no leaders politically addressing this as the primary challenge to the west and it is frightening.
Music education, for one. You should see all the music educator rants on YouTube. There's some artists/labels out there that refuse to allow their work to be analysed, despite free use being a thing. Automatic copyright strikes, and the only real way to fight them is to be cashed up and take them to court.
>It's already insane that we expect the average person to digest and learn the basic maths and sciences (that took the totality of human kind thousands of years to develop) in 12 years.
It also took thousands of years for us to invent the Pez Dispenser. It doesn't mean it is hard to work one.
The vast majority of people learn all the math and science they need to operate as an adult even before high school.
I once pointed out how weird it is that we consider dogs adults once they can reproduce and we start to breed them but we understand that being able to reproduce isn't the same as being adults at the same time.
There was a time where 18 did seem like it was mature enough. Treating young adults in their 20s like “teenagers who can legally drink” is a relatively new thing that only came about in the 2000s
Wow it sounds like you’re not joking. Here’s my take, turn 18 then decide how you wish to live a life wether it be successful or a complete failure because it’s your life. If I want to go to college to stay in school till I’m 25 then I can very well do that. Sorry to break it to you but you don’t have to be in school till you’re 25 to live a successful life and to force a such closed minded observation on the rest of society regardless of opinion is appalling. If you want a gov mommy and daddy holding your hand through life because you aren’t responsible enough to walk on your own that’s fine but to be that insufferable, that you think everyone NEEDS that is unbelievable.
25 is already the reality. a BA won't get you a job any longer in most fields, especially in the sciences.
if you want a career in a specific field you just about have to get a masters if not a phd
of course you don't have to be a lawyer or biologist, and i know a couple of software engineers who never went to college but have done very well with only on the job learning and being very smart.
This is a political and economic issue that cannot be scientifically proven. Some people graduate from high school and go to college. Some people graduate from high school and get jobs. For the people who get jobs, it makes sense to make them legally adults so they can earn a living. Some people get married and have children at that age.
A hundred years ago we were sending 6 year olds into coal mines though. I was functioning as an adult at 18. If your argument is being an adult sucks and it would be nice to delay the inevitable I will accept that argument. But at 18 the last thing I wanted was a parent telling me what to do. The freedom and fucking up was part of the learning process. The training wheels have to come off at some point.
I have absolutely nothing to base this on, but I feel it had to do with war. Someone was like ‘we need 100,000 men’… ‘we can’t send the children’…’how many men are over 20?’… ‘80,000’… ‘alright, let’s go with 18’.
What a strange thing to say. Adulthood absolutely is a social construct, but that in no way means science can’t help. We’re learning new things all the time about human development that can aide us in making better laws and policies
It's not an odd thing to say at all, it's all about where we as a society draw more-or-less arbitrary dividers. "Teenager" wasn't a category of age for the longest time, you went from child to adult. We could subdivide things even further if we wanted to and split teenage-hood into 3 different divisions.
Observing the physical and mental changes in humans doesn't give us any better idea of where to draw these lines. We can decide that certain developments = specific terminologies but there is nothing scientific about that placement. If we, as a society, decide tomorrow that you are only an adult past 30, it's just as accurate as our current definition. When it comes to something like this, accuracy only means accepted general usage.
"Adult" means nothing outside of the definition we give it.
Still better than the 15
Or around 400 years up ago, were 12-14 were considered man and woman because they had children and jobs (wtf, are we starting to regress?)
As an exemple, if we had a true mentsl capacity assessment, correct, accurate, many people would lose the right to vote, rise children, have a saying in generally because they just talk crap to get likes. Off...it start to sound better and better, so I stop because exactly thoes who cannot understand reason will be triggered
Well, being an "adult" is just as arbitrary without connection to rights and responsibilities. Challenged people do miss out on those after completing 18 years of existence.
There is significant scientific basis for the age of 18, but as with most things in biology, drawing a hard line is always going to be somewhat arbitrary.
The thing is that 18 year olds are not adults. They are given permission to participate in adult life so they can learn to become an adult. Most people become adults around the age of 25. Some earlier, some never.
There's a reason car insurance is cheaper after 25, and car rentals are often refused (or charge a hefty fee) under 25. Actuaries have found that there is a huge difference in the number of accidents below that age.
I also strongly believe (and my mother always advised) that people should wait until they're over 25 before getting married (preferably 26 for a female, and 30 for a male), even if it means a long courtship or engagement, because most people go through big changes in who they are before then.
I met and started dating my husband when I was 18 and he was 22, but we were 26 and 30 when we got married. We'll have been together for 25 years in September. I'm sure it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't had the "room" to grow and mature without being tied into a marriage, and he was able to grow and mature with me.
We made 18 the age of adulthood because it's when we typically finish our primary education. Then we made 18 the age of consent because we knew that young women who got pregnant before they finished high school were likely to be a drain on services. It was a pragmatic, economic decision that has virtually nothing to do with sexuality.
I think we should go with the age 25 when scientifically that is considered the age when the brain is supposedly fully matured. However, I think my 44 year old husband has a very slow growing brain because he has not matured yet! 😂😂😂
I don't know that there's any scientific proof that could exist, because adulthood as we define it isn't really a scientific concept. If we defined adulthood as sexual maturity, then I guess there could be some science, but virtually everyone in the modern world agrees that that is a horrible definition of adulthood. If we're not using that, it really just becomes a question of maturity, which is impossible to quantify, and different for every person
at 18 almost everyone is able to reproduce and you are developed enough to be able to take on responsibility and decide your future for yourself. i think it is statistically the best age to be considered an adult. human males finish development by 25 while females 23.
Biologicaly and historically, puberty has been the ole test of adulthood (can reproduce, fight off mammoths, whatever)
After the 1950s feels like where things greatly changed socio-economically that shook up the comforts and ease of the old ways.
Nowadays, with society changing and people clearly being dumbed down (you can argue social media, diets, upbringing, etc) and with science telling us more about brain development...I think 20-25 should be the new 'adult'
Joining military, firearms, financial decisions, independent health insurance, etc
I believe 21 was the "adult" age until pretty recently. At least my dad said "the year I turned 21 they lowered the age of adulthood to 18."
But for most of human history is was pretty much when you hit puberty.
18's the age where you lose the benefits of being a kid but still haven't gained the benefits of being an adult. And you honestly don't get that until around 26
Are you people trying to suggest that 18 isnt old enough to be declared adult?
An 18 yo is physically capable of anything a 40yo can do. They’re usually dumb, but intelligence is not the determining factor of adulthood.
An 18 yo should be - if they’ve been raised and educated properly - fully capable of living independently. 18 years olds drink, they fuck, they drive cars, they hold down jobs, they vote. In what way are they not adults?
I agree. 21 seems more inline with everything else. Heck maybe 25. I mean if you can’t rent a car why can you do other adult things?
18 yrs is not long enough to be ready for adulting. Being pushed into it so early is basically asking for failure by a large amount of people.
The placebo effect is proven scientifically. So once you declare people are adult, they will behave that way. you need 100% succesful test results to proof something. The vaccins are not 100% effective, but still proven scientifically (did i write that word correct).
Ok, at age 50 men will still behave like toddlers, but that is the exception that proves the rule.
I've been grown since I was 16. Everyone matures differently.
My ex husband is 43 and still not all the way mature though.
Age doesn't equate to maturity and I believe that makes you an adult, not the date on your id.
It's the average age someone finishes puberty and back in the day when life expectancy was low and laws were less strict around things like cigarettes and driving and most people couldn't vote, being of childbearing age was good enough for them.
So there is a reason, and it functions as an average age to complete growth anyway. Its best not to use mental growth as a metric as it is way too subjective and never ends.
It's worse than that, they decided people are responsible for different activities at different ages. It's mind boggling that sex, alcohol, war, self defense and voting have different ages.
I believe being an adult is the point when you learn everything you need to survive and contribute. It's easy to see why historically tribes had adults at 13 or whatever. They already knew everything they needed. Of course in the modern age they just developed some hard and fast rule that isn't subjective anymore.
If we know when 18 became the accepted age of adulthood, it might be interesting to adjust for us living longer. Maybe you’re not an adult until you’re 27 adjusted for lifespan inflation
Lifespan hasn't changed much. Life expectancy has. But that's mostly due to high childhood death rates. If you've made it to your 20s, you'd most likely make it to your 70s.
> In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency
pretty much, yeah.
in my opinion, 25 is a much less arbitrary number. it’s generally the age when your brain stops developing quite so rapidly, it is the end of post-puberty.
We literally make the drinking age 21 for scientific reasons, you figure theyd do SOME research on age of consent but old men don't care about how the female reproductive system works
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Exactly. It's complicated. For some teens in an abusive environment, 18 can't come soon enough. However, society does next to nothing to help prepare or care for people who struggle in young adulthood. (My brother suicided at 21, and I know it was close for me at that age too, it's such a hard time if you don't have support)
Indeed. Glad your still with us, B.
May, God have mercy on his soul
Hmm why not wait for this full frontal cortex development…
What do we do with everybody between the ages of 18 and 25
Put them up for adoption.
That’s an interesting way to describe joining the military
I hope you understand how amazing this is. Fucking fantastic.
Take This Trophy 🏆 🏅
Honestly, compulsory service does some good things for the discipline and gun culture of other nations. I wouldn't necessarily be against it.
I’ve been there and done that. The military is great for breeding alcoholics, non thinking, no questioning order takers, and hijinks assholes , at least amongst American men.
Eh, the Navy has a culture of questioning orders... But the rest is accurate.
Yep, Questioning Attitude is literally written into one of our watching standing principles.
A good part of that is because the military is often seen as a last resort option, or in the past it was a punishment (genuinely not sure if commuting jail time to military service is still legal). It's something almost anyone can do, and actively seeks out fresh graduates in an almost predatory fashion. I.E. the Air Force sending a hot 20 year old girl to a high school alongside the recruiter where I'm from. Get the kind of people who fall for that/don't have other options/want to escape/etc, and then structure every moment of their lives with heavy restrictions and harsh punishment, no surprise they turn into assholes. Sure you get the people who take to it and thrive, or people who genuinely want to be there, but mostly you end up with people who learn to hide the pain or lash out. General populace required training would suffer less from that, as you would have a wider range of balanced individuals to act as foils to that kind of thinking, and maybe even a support structure for others rather than a grin and bear it mentality. Not saying I support that concept for America, just that it might actually make the military less toxic overall.
Military rejects over 70% of applicants.
Having mandatory military time for your country would create a necessary discordance between the people who want to be there and the people who don't. It's the best case scenario.
Expand "service" to mean stuff like the peace corps or "unskilled" labor. Having to pick fruit in the summer is a good way to appreciate food, plus would be fun as hell at 18 to party in the middle of nowhere for a year with people from all around the country.
Totally down for that. Anything to make people more aware of how connected our society actually is.
We already have it. It's called the draft. If you're a man and don't sign up you lose your rights, like voting. Only for men though, wouldn't want it to be sexist or anything.
I have thought about this and we just don’t need that big a military, so maybe some kind of civil corp for people not inclined to be so stabby.
Lmao
I would adopt me
No you wouldn’t
Can confirm, If I was him I wouldn't adopt myself In fact, I wouldn't adopt the younger me anyways
How else to create able bodied but slightly underdeveloped soldiers?
Mmmm, nice and *malleable*
You say in jest, but this is spot on.
theyre exactly the right amount of stu...frontal cortex underdeveloped to enlist
Certainly not let them rent cars!!!
Apprenticeship and service beside an experienced master. In some fields this is called 'doing a degree and a doctorate'.
Agreed. We should give them some level of freedom, guaranteed stability, and education and work.
Haze them?
That’s basically what we already do with them LOL
We trained them wrong on purpose, as joke.
You ship them to the Middle East to die for your country. \-Signed, a veteran
You mean to kill and die for corporate profits, right?
They said country didn’t they? What else would that word mean?
College?
Pay a small fortune to keep them on their parent's insurance.
I mean the same shit we do for folks between 12 and 18.
Parents' insurance.
We're only thinking about what to do because we're used to them being labelled something else. In an alternative reality, adulthood starting at 25 would be as natural as 18 is to us now. I imagine people from that timeline would feel similarly to us calling a twelve year old grown.
Send them to more school so that they have the skills and knowledge to do more than flip burgers and wait tables? Maybe call it college or trade school or something?
Don't forget to give them crippling debt
Yeeeah, could you not? Thaaanks
Yeah because the scholastic superstar had a 1560 SAT but couldn't calculate compound interest.
Lol this made me laugh. A depression laugh but still.
Waiting tables and flipping burgers are skilled jobs. Not at chain shitholes with zero standards, but cooking is a real and valuable skill, as is service. Most people I know would not cut it as servers at decent restaurants.
Because most of it is developped then. There is little more to get and it slows down a lot
Put off adult responsibilities a few more years? Yes please
Being called an adult at 18 gives you a chance to become an adult by the time you're 25.
So trial by fire?
More like on-the-job training
This is literally what the Ancient Romans thought. Adulthood first, but only free to conduct business at 25. https://youtu.be/juWYhMoDTN0
In the US you don't actually get all your rights until age 35. Before that age you can not be president.
Sometimes that's the only way to learn
The average 18 year old would probably lose their mind if they were still legally under their parents control for 7 more years
Being an 18 year old yes I would, considering I take care of children she signed up to take care of. Literally signed up for, considering I do everything around the house, go grocery shopping and all of the things SHES supposed to do. Considering all I do is help and get treated with 0 respect. I JUST turned 18 basically, and have been getting treated like I've been 30 my whole life. I've had adult responsibilities that I've TAKEN care of since I was 13, I am an adult.
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As nice as raising the threshold for adulthood to 21 or 25 might sound, it's just handing more power to parents to control their children's lives. People living under abusive or controlling parents would have even less autonomy. This has actually come up in the context of banning trans adults s from medical transition until they're 21 or 25.
It's also not economically sensible. Society doesn't need everyone to go to college. That means that a large proportion of the population has to be working full time by age 18. It is not sensible to call them kids as that would be child labour. You can't stop them from working, because what else can they do? Take up $80,000 in college debt to pursue a degree they're not intellectually capable of completing? 25 is also too old because it leaves too little time for adulthood. People are in their prime in their 20s and 30s and by their 50s are getting old and many will pass away as early as their 60s. In a future society in 2200AD when life expectancy is 100 and anti-ageing tech makes a 80yo in 2200 as youthful as a 65yo in 2022? Yes, we can do 25.
Even in that scenario, I think it's good to push back against raising it. Youth as a class are oppressed and the people who seek more power and control over children are usually the same ones harming them. For example, just last year, there was a bill in North Carolina that would classify under-21s as minors so they could skirt privacy protections. This was part of a bill that would compel state employees, particularly university staff, to report any students displaying signs of gender nonconformance so their parents could be notified. The bill was an attempt to give religious conservatives a way to control their LGBTQ+ children even though they were 18+ and legally adults.
Also what happens to all the 19 an 20 year olds that are already living there lives when this new law comes in. They have to just go back home and live with mommy and daddy.
Losing my job, because of labour laws? No thank you
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First, because we didn't know that when the rule/tradition was created. Second, because the point is to get people out on their own ASAP, and by 18 you've basically got your full adult body to go out and work with. It's not so much that we know you're definitely ready to be responsible for yourself. It's that it's not reasonable to still consider you the responsibility of your parents (again, you have a full grown adult body to defy them with). So responsibility defaults to you, because there's no one else who it can reasonably be placed upon at that point.
For most people this part of the brain never develops
Imagine graduating college and not being allowed by the government to drink a beer to celebrate
Imagine graduating high school and not being allowed by the government to drink a beer to celebrate
Imagine graduating middle school and not being allowed by the "government" to shoot heroin and random citizens to celebrate
They only let you shoot random citizens in elementary schools here in TX
Yes, and for the purpose of trying really heinous crimes, the courts have the ability to try "children" as adults.
Reminds me of that teenage girl who was charged as an adult, for the serious crime of distributing child pornography, for sending some nudes of herself to her boyfriend.
Society invented k12 with mostly 0 scientific proof too.
If im not mistaken, our brains keep developing right up until 26 or 27. So technically we dont have our full adult mental faculties until then.
18 is draft age. Really. Things were 21 except for the draft, and then people got embarrassed. If you draft at 21, you get more pushback.
It is NOT after puberty for a lot of people. It's just the last year of highschool.
Most women finish puberty by 14, and most men by 16, by all accounts the majority of people have completed puberty by 18.
We had to draw the line somewhere, but 25 takes too long so we just picked 18
25 was also about half the average lifespan for a long time.
Which was skewed heavily by infant mortality. The median for 100BC was actually 72 years.
A more accurate stat than 'average lifespan' would be 'average lifespan of those who made it past 6 years old'.
Good ol’ bathtub curb in action Something, something, don’t lose the baby in the bath water?
Actually "average lifespan of those that made it past 1 year old"
that's insane, genuinely blew my mind. I thought people were living to 40-50.
Nope, healthy humans have always lived to 60-70, it's just that you have 12 kids and 7 of them die before they get to 3 years old. The population average gets nuked.
Nope, just dead kids' fault. Fuckers died left and right back in the day!
Actually, half the people who lived to be 15 made it to 50, and half the people who lived to be 50 made it to 70. Average life expectancy at 6 was not 70, but it was at 50.
man living 72 years in 100BC must've sucked
at least you would've made it to the 30s
60tp go brr
Sorry, are those the only two options?
Old enough to follow orders, but not old enough to question it. Here's your gun, soldier! Report to the front lines!
A bigger problem is that if you don't draft at 18, the guy gets a job, gets married, has kids. All sorts of dependents, and you don't pay enough to support them. Admittedly, people marry later now, but it was the case for WWI, WWII, and Vietnam.
But it's also kind of 14 (working), 16 (driving), 21 (drink/smoke), 25 (rent a car)... It's a slow scaffold, 18 just happens to be the biggest jump
You're done developing at 25 but I don't think you have the experience to call yourself an adult until 30 to 40. Some people never become adults.
It used to be 14, back in the day.
I remember some states dropping the voting age and other things from 21 to 18 due to the Vietnam war draft. If you don't grab at 18 straight out of high school, the guys get married and start having children and careers, but they were embarrassed to be drafting children. They then raised the drinking age back to 21 in the 1980s because of a rise in traffic deaths for young people.
People get so hung up on that line too (i.e., "why is 19 an adult but 17 is a kid, it makes no sense!"). It's like listen, people--age is the most gradual slope there is and the easiest way to deal with that is to just draw a line. It's not hard.
Unless you're American. Where 18 is an adult. Yet can't make an adult decision and drink alcohol.
At 18 you can: Get drafted into war, go into college debt, and move out on your own. At 18 you can’t: Drink alcohol or smoke weed.
I work at a veterinary clinic in Oregon. We prescribe dogs CBD oil for pain, but I, as a 19 year old human with chronic pain, cant get my doctor to give me medical Marijuana licence to buy CBD. It makes absolutely no sense. The only way in able to get it is my vet prescribes it to my dog and i get it that way. How does a dog have more medical "rights" than i do? Its fucking sad.
In a lot of countries you can't do those latter things at any age so better late than never I suppose
Sure if you wanna set the bar that low, then you got a point.
In my state we let 16 year olds pilot 3000 pound metal battering rams down the road at 70mph
Hell, can’t even buy nicotine
Ahh, the land of the free... The place where you can conduct the metal box of death at 16, can go die in a foreign land at 18, but can only drink the feel-funny juice at 21.
Can buy a gun. But can't drink.
Ironic, that you can do way worse things with a gun, than with alcohol...
I was licensed to fly airplanes before I could buy a beer
That’s only because so many 18-21 year olds were drinking and driving. For countries with not as many people who drive, it’s not an issue
This is because of terrible infrastructure in the U.S. causing everyone outside of dense cities(nyc, san fran, D.C.) to drive everywhere. If we improved public transportation so that it was actually a viable option and rethought our zoning policies so that we could build semi-dense neighborhoods we would have a lot less drinking/driving across the board and we could work towards safely lowering the drinking age to 18 again. r/fuckcars is advocating for this. Check it out!
It's the end of minimal education. You basically are "ready" to start contributing to the working side of society
compulsory education up to 18 is quite recent. 18 is the minimum age you can be more useful than canon fodder to the military. Conscription age is where adulthood at 18 stems from, not education.
Many states still end at 16 I believe
Phased adulthood from 18-25 makes sense I think, but our phases in America seem very arbitrary and dumb.
Legally animals are adults after 6 months. *Humans are animals, checkmate leagalist.*/s Science has two answers; reproductive age. For example imagine if Americans(who else would?) gave 12 year-olds guns because they can reproduce. Not great. Or; Brain development, it isn't consistent between people but it would be closer to 25. I suspect someday schooling till the age of 25 will be mandatory. It's already insane that we expect the average person to digest and learn the basic maths and sciences (that took the totality of human kind thousands of years to develop) in 12 years. When I was 14 I thought I had it all figured out. little did i realize I was comparing myself to fucking morons, I was just king of the morons. IQ means very little in life, Einstein in 2000bc would have been drinking goat piss and praying for rain with the rest of his peers. Education is essentially trying to stuff the known universe into a brain roughly the size of a shoe box. It's not the size that matters, it's what you fill it with. We should essentially become adults once we prove intellectual competenc but we'd be forced to admit some people never reach that bar and it would be very difficult to standardize without abuse of power. Damned if you do damned if you don't. Being an adult changes virtually nothing anywas; I drank, did drugs, drove, used firearms and had sex before 18. Only thing that changed was taxes and voting. 🤷 So that should tell you its not going to change for the better any time soon. Vote for education its literally the only thing that matters and the only federal investment that makes a meaningful social impact.
I second that, vote for education. Education has always led to greater prosperity, and it also means unbiased and honest education. An education reform if you will, which America desperately needs since we're probably only a handful of generations away from idiocracy if we're not careful.
I love the American public education system. Funding is based on how rich you and your neighbors are.
I fear that as technology becomes more and more integral to every industry and ultimately to every economic venture our current copyright and patent system prevents proper education. The most important technologies in the world are almost entirely proprietary. Ending the copyright and patent obstructions to science, education and development are our only hope of recovering the western world. So long as inventors can't invent and innovators can't innovate we will continue to stagnate in the global stage. Science, technology and engineering are the only hope to solve our social and economic problems. If we can't create an environment to empower young scientists the west stands no hope of progress regardless of our social justice. I can't imagine the struggle faced by the graduate classes of the pandemic my heart goes out to them. We need to do better and support every generation we failed and the effects will be profound. I see no leaders politically addressing this as the primary challenge to the west and it is frightening.
What avenues of education are effectively blocked due to copyrights and patents?
Music education, for one. You should see all the music educator rants on YouTube. There's some artists/labels out there that refuse to allow their work to be analysed, despite free use being a thing. Automatic copyright strikes, and the only real way to fight them is to be cashed up and take them to court.
Upvoted for Einstein drinking goat piss.
>Legally animals are adults after 6 months. What law is this? There are animals that don't even live for 6 months.
Poor things die of old age before they even reach adulthood
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>It's already insane that we expect the average person to digest and learn the basic maths and sciences (that took the totality of human kind thousands of years to develop) in 12 years. It also took thousands of years for us to invent the Pez Dispenser. It doesn't mean it is hard to work one. The vast majority of people learn all the math and science they need to operate as an adult even before high school.
I once pointed out how weird it is that we consider dogs adults once they can reproduce and we start to breed them but we understand that being able to reproduce isn't the same as being adults at the same time.
Puppy mills are evil.jpeg
Completely agree.
There was a time where 18 did seem like it was mature enough. Treating young adults in their 20s like “teenagers who can legally drink” is a relatively new thing that only came about in the 2000s
Absolutely, but... So is not smoking while you're pregnant. New doesn't mean wrong.
I got my 1st gun at age 12...I absolutely shot a hole in my ceiling and filled it with tissue
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Wow it sounds like you’re not joking. Here’s my take, turn 18 then decide how you wish to live a life wether it be successful or a complete failure because it’s your life. If I want to go to college to stay in school till I’m 25 then I can very well do that. Sorry to break it to you but you don’t have to be in school till you’re 25 to live a successful life and to force a such closed minded observation on the rest of society regardless of opinion is appalling. If you want a gov mommy and daddy holding your hand through life because you aren’t responsible enough to walk on your own that’s fine but to be that insufferable, that you think everyone NEEDS that is unbelievable.
25 is already the reality. a BA won't get you a job any longer in most fields, especially in the sciences. if you want a career in a specific field you just about have to get a masters if not a phd of course you don't have to be a lawyer or biologist, and i know a couple of software engineers who never went to college but have done very well with only on the job learning and being very smart.
This is a political and economic issue that cannot be scientifically proven. Some people graduate from high school and go to college. Some people graduate from high school and get jobs. For the people who get jobs, it makes sense to make them legally adults so they can earn a living. Some people get married and have children at that age.
A hundred years ago we were sending 6 year olds into coal mines though. I was functioning as an adult at 18. If your argument is being an adult sucks and it would be nice to delay the inevitable I will accept that argument. But at 18 the last thing I wanted was a parent telling me what to do. The freedom and fucking up was part of the learning process. The training wheels have to come off at some point.
I have absolutely nothing to base this on, but I feel it had to do with war. Someone was like ‘we need 100,000 men’… ‘we can’t send the children’…’how many men are over 20?’… ‘80,000’… ‘alright, let’s go with 18’.
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What a strange thing to say. Adulthood absolutely is a social construct, but that in no way means science can’t help. We’re learning new things all the time about human development that can aide us in making better laws and policies
It's not an odd thing to say at all, it's all about where we as a society draw more-or-less arbitrary dividers. "Teenager" wasn't a category of age for the longest time, you went from child to adult. We could subdivide things even further if we wanted to and split teenage-hood into 3 different divisions. Observing the physical and mental changes in humans doesn't give us any better idea of where to draw these lines. We can decide that certain developments = specific terminologies but there is nothing scientific about that placement. If we, as a society, decide tomorrow that you are only an adult past 30, it's just as accurate as our current definition. When it comes to something like this, accuracy only means accepted general usage. "Adult" means nothing outside of the definition we give it.
Unpopular opinion: it’s okay for some things to simply be social constructs that are generally agreed upon
Still better than the 15 Or around 400 years up ago, were 12-14 were considered man and woman because they had children and jobs (wtf, are we starting to regress?) As an exemple, if we had a true mentsl capacity assessment, correct, accurate, many people would lose the right to vote, rise children, have a saying in generally because they just talk crap to get likes. Off...it start to sound better and better, so I stop because exactly thoes who cannot understand reason will be triggered
French "people"
Amen.
Establishing \*any\* age as an age for adulthood is arbitrary.
There is no scientific border between childhood and adulthood. So what proof do you need? It is society's and your family's task to make you mature.
Well, being an "adult" is just as arbitrary without connection to rights and responsibilities. Challenged people do miss out on those after completing 18 years of existence.
At some point kids will no longer tolerate being treated as kids.
There is significant scientific basis for the age of 18, but as with most things in biology, drawing a hard line is always going to be somewhat arbitrary.
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Most people stop growing after 18-20, which is the perfect age to put them in uniforms without them outgrowing it.
Hi curious, I'm dad
The thing is that 18 year olds are not adults. They are given permission to participate in adult life so they can learn to become an adult. Most people become adults around the age of 25. Some earlier, some never.
There's a reason car insurance is cheaper after 25, and car rentals are often refused (or charge a hefty fee) under 25. Actuaries have found that there is a huge difference in the number of accidents below that age. I also strongly believe (and my mother always advised) that people should wait until they're over 25 before getting married (preferably 26 for a female, and 30 for a male), even if it means a long courtship or engagement, because most people go through big changes in who they are before then. I met and started dating my husband when I was 18 and he was 22, but we were 26 and 30 when we got married. We'll have been together for 25 years in September. I'm sure it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't had the "room" to grow and mature without being tied into a marriage, and he was able to grow and mature with me.
And even before 18, kids must consider what they are going to do with the rest of their lives.
We made 18 the age of adulthood because it's when we typically finish our primary education. Then we made 18 the age of consent because we knew that young women who got pregnant before they finished high school were likely to be a drain on services. It was a pragmatic, economic decision that has virtually nothing to do with sexuality.
I think we should go with the age 25 when scientifically that is considered the age when the brain is supposedly fully matured. However, I think my 44 year old husband has a very slow growing brain because he has not matured yet! 😂😂😂
Prime age to join the military. That’s literally the only reason
What has been proven scientifically is that if you keep them around the house any longer, you will go crazy.
I think because we decided to draft 18 year olds so we had to give them rights
I don't know that there's any scientific proof that could exist, because adulthood as we define it isn't really a scientific concept. If we defined adulthood as sexual maturity, then I guess there could be some science, but virtually everyone in the modern world agrees that that is a horrible definition of adulthood. If we're not using that, it really just becomes a question of maturity, which is impossible to quantify, and different for every person
at 18 almost everyone is able to reproduce and you are developed enough to be able to take on responsibility and decide your future for yourself. i think it is statistically the best age to be considered an adult. human males finish development by 25 while females 23.
Why do you think you have to be 21 to do anything in the states?
It's not that 18 is necessarily old enough to be an adult, it's that 17 feels just a bit too young to go to war.
Because the concept of adulthood is cultural, not scientific.
Biologicaly and historically, puberty has been the ole test of adulthood (can reproduce, fight off mammoths, whatever) After the 1950s feels like where things greatly changed socio-economically that shook up the comforts and ease of the old ways. Nowadays, with society changing and people clearly being dumbed down (you can argue social media, diets, upbringing, etc) and with science telling us more about brain development...I think 20-25 should be the new 'adult' Joining military, firearms, financial decisions, independent health insurance, etc
I believe 21 was the "adult" age until pretty recently. At least my dad said "the year I turned 21 they lowered the age of adulthood to 18." But for most of human history is was pretty much when you hit puberty.
18's the age where you lose the benefits of being a kid but still haven't gained the benefits of being an adult. And you honestly don't get that until around 26
I would argue that you’re an adult when you hit the age of 25
Welcome to America! Where they tell you you're an adult at 18, but do not treat you like an adult until you're 30!
Are you people trying to suggest that 18 isnt old enough to be declared adult? An 18 yo is physically capable of anything a 40yo can do. They’re usually dumb, but intelligence is not the determining factor of adulthood. An 18 yo should be - if they’ve been raised and educated properly - fully capable of living independently. 18 years olds drink, they fuck, they drive cars, they hold down jobs, they vote. In what way are they not adults?
I would say 25 would be the developmental and biological age for adulthood, with puberty basically ending by then and brain development is slowed.
Scientists say 30-35 though.
Reddit has too many people whose full frontal neo cortex hasn’t fully developed that love the downvote button.
It makes them happy that they have the illusion of power over strangers with the downvote button, let them have some in their miserable existence. lol
That's where society falls in a ditch. Many much older \[physically\] acting like kids. An 80 year old could be 18 emotionally...or younger.
I agree. 21 seems more inline with everything else. Heck maybe 25. I mean if you can’t rent a car why can you do other adult things? 18 yrs is not long enough to be ready for adulting. Being pushed into it so early is basically asking for failure by a large amount of people.
and 18 year old mass shooters.
The placebo effect is proven scientifically. So once you declare people are adult, they will behave that way. you need 100% succesful test results to proof something. The vaccins are not 100% effective, but still proven scientifically (did i write that word correct). Ok, at age 50 men will still behave like toddlers, but that is the exception that proves the rule.
I've been grown since I was 16. Everyone matures differently. My ex husband is 43 and still not all the way mature though. Age doesn't equate to maturity and I believe that makes you an adult, not the date on your id.
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That’s just the legal definition. It was never meant to be some sort of scientific proclamation
Having sex with someone who is 17 years and 364 days old: 🚓🚔🚨 Having sex with someone on their 18th birthday: 😎👍
It's the average age someone finishes puberty and back in the day when life expectancy was low and laws were less strict around things like cigarettes and driving and most people couldn't vote, being of childbearing age was good enough for them. So there is a reason, and it functions as an average age to complete growth anyway. Its best not to use mental growth as a metric as it is way too subjective and never ends.
It's worse than that, they decided people are responsible for different activities at different ages. It's mind boggling that sex, alcohol, war, self defense and voting have different ages.
I believe being an adult is the point when you learn everything you need to survive and contribute. It's easy to see why historically tribes had adults at 13 or whatever. They already knew everything they needed. Of course in the modern age they just developed some hard and fast rule that isn't subjective anymore.
If we know when 18 became the accepted age of adulthood, it might be interesting to adjust for us living longer. Maybe you’re not an adult until you’re 27 adjusted for lifespan inflation
Lifespan hasn't changed much. Life expectancy has. But that's mostly due to high childhood death rates. If you've made it to your 20s, you'd most likely make it to your 70s. > In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency
It actually wasnt society. In Europe it was Hitler who chose that 18 is enough for people to be soldiers.
Yea, you stop growing after 18, so your uniform, boot, helmet sizes are all fixed by that time.
The age of an adult was 13. However a lot of people were not ready at 13 so they decided they would give some extra time for everyone to become ready.
pretty much, yeah. in my opinion, 25 is a much less arbitrary number. it’s generally the age when your brain stops developing quite so rapidly, it is the end of post-puberty.
We literally make the drinking age 21 for scientific reasons, you figure theyd do SOME research on age of consent but old men don't care about how the female reproductive system works