In the digital age, young people need more time to prepare for adulthood.
Wait, experienced readers will say. So, in adolescents it will be necessary to retroactively record the hero of the civil war Shchors, who died at 24? Or his peer Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President Kennedy? And among the current ones, the world football star and multimillionaire Neymar has just emerged from adolescence? It’s absurd!
But do not rush to chop from the shoulder. A group of Australian scientists led by University of Melbourne professor Susana Sawyer presented quite serious arguments in favor of their non-trivial idea. The study was published in one of the most respected medical publications in the world, the Lancet.
Infantilism or the need for education?
The World Health Organization has set adolescent boundaries from 10 to 19 years old. In most European countries, the age of majority is 18. However, our idea of adulthood does not coincide with the real state of affairs.
- There are two groups of reasons that force us to expand the boundaries of adolescence - says Susan Sawyer. - First, these are social factors. We live in an era of digital post-industrial economy, when young people need more time to get a competitive education. Accordingly, the dates are shifted when they can play social roles inherent in an adult. We are talking about financial independence, the ability to create a full-fledged family, to be a father or mother.
For example, in the UK, the number of young people aged 20 to 34 who continue to live under the same roof with their parents has increased by almost a million over the past 20 years. In 1996, there were 2.7 million such people, and in 2017 - already 3.4 million. And the age of the first marriage of the British today has increased by 8 years compared to 1973. Gentlemen marry on average at the age of 32.5 years, ladies go down the aisle at 30.6 years. By the way, a similar situation is observed in Russia. Over the past 15 years, the age of registration of first marriage has increased by almost 3 years: for men from 24.4 to 27.4, and for the fair sex from 22.2 to 25.0.
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By the way, something similar has already been observed in the history of mankind. Until the 19th century, adolescence was generally not singled out as a special age category. Childhood ended immediately with the onset of puberty. Then boys and girls immediately entered adulthood and early marriage, on the contrary, was the norm. It is worth remembering at least a scene from Eugene Onegin, Tatyana's conversation with the old nanny:
- But how did you get married, nanny?
- So, apparently, God told. My Vanya
I was younger, my light, And I was thirteen years old.
All because of the school
However, the needs of the industrial revolution led to the introduction of the school system in many countries. The social and technological organization of society has become so complicated that a new age period was needed for a person to successfully enter adulthood. But from the point of view of 19th-century parents, who found that children should hang on their necks, at least until they graduated from school, it all looked like an attempt on the foundations, infantilism, and so on. And only in 1904, when the American psychologist Stanley Hall published a 2-volume work "Adolescence", where he first used this term, contemporaries realized that the world around them and they themselves had changed a lot.
Biological markers
Another reason that pushes us to push the age of majority to 24 is biology. Humans continue to evolve as a species. Puberty has always been considered a biological marker of early adolescence. Susana Sawyer cites the following data: in Western European countries, over the past 150 years, thanks to good nutrition and progress in health care, girls have begun to turn into girls on average 4 years earlier. Therefore, the lower limit of adolescence was shifted from 14 to 10 years.
However, recent studies show that the border needs to be moved in the other direction, because biological maturation continues after 20 years. The most visible confirmation of this thesis is the appearance of wisdom teeth. But the most important thing is that before the age of 25, those areas of the brain that are responsible for the formation of a person's personality develop. First of all, we are talking about the prefrontal cortex - the zone that is responsible for the formation of consciousness. This department helps us set goals, plan our actions, weigh risks, assess our actions and manage our own emotions. Many of these functions begin to develop in adolescence, but we are ready to completely control our behavior from a physiological point of view only by the age of 25, when the hormonal background is completely stabilized.
This means that people who are legally considered adults since they are 18 years old are physically unable to make adult decisions, says Susan Sawyer in his work. And it's not a lack of life experience. The physiology of the brain forces them to make rash impulsive decisions, the consequences of which are difficult for them to assess.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV