When do you become an adult?

TheCatWoman said:

Should we hold someone back from doing "adult" things because they're not 18 even when they're ready?

If we hold back people from being capable of being an adult until later and later in the name of protecting them, then we are delaying their ability to become adults - essentially creating generations of tweenagers who are being held back until later and later.

I started working when I was 15, was seriously considering getting married at 16 (not that rare an occurrance in Scotland in the 1980s) and was off to University at 17 to a few years of drinking, sexual experimentation and all sorts of things that are denied to people these days by law.

I'm a firm believer that the blanket rules are suffocating and restrict your personal freedoms.

If the person if not mature enough at 17 to be treated as an adult then the education system and parents are failing their children in teaching them life skills and the right mindset to mature.

Labour are pushing for 16 year olds to be treated as adults and vote - is this a cynical ploy to harvest votes from impressionable and vulnerable children or them acknowledging that they should be treated as adults?

TheCatWoman said:

Should we hold someone back from doing "adult" things because they're not 18 even when they're ready?

If we hold back people from being capable of being an adult until later and later in the name of protecting them, then we are delaying their ability to become adults - essentially creating generations of tweenagers who are being held back until later and later.

I started working when I was 15, was seriously considering getting married at 16 (not that rare an occurrance in Scotland in the 1980s) and was off to University at 17 to a few years of drinking, sexual experimentation and all sorts of things that are denied to people these days by law.

I'm a firm believer that the blanket rules are suffocating and restrict your personal freedoms.

If the person if not mature enough at 17 to be treated as an adult then the education system and parents are failing their children in teaching them life skills and the right mindset to mature.

Labour are pushing for 16 year olds to be treated as adults and vote - is this a cynical ploy to harvest votes from impressionable and vulnerable children or them acknowledging that they should be treated as adults?

Iain said:

If the person if not mature enough at 17 to be treated as an adult then the education system and parents are failing their children in teaching them life skills and the right mindset to mature.

Nearly 50 years on  from  knowing I couldn't  cope with the non academic side of uni life I've got better, but still struggle with day to day practical things  that many others take in their stride. The educational system in the early 1960s to mid 1970s wasn't equipped to do the best for children and teenagers like me. Thankfully it's a lot better nowadays for such children and teenagers, though still far from perfect.

Even now much of the psychiatric system has a mindset that thinks if you can do x well , then automatically you can do y well. Failure to do so gets you branded as having a 'character defect'. You don't get much needed help and support, because it assumed, quite wrongly, that you don't need it.

It took till I was 60, thanks to intervention by my daughter, for long held false beliefs about me  to be demolished. Unfortunately its too late to fix the damage  that was caused.  For peace of mind I have to live with as things are, rather than how they should've been.

I'm not sure many here can understand a person like me. The vast majority of the population very probably doesn't.