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I found an interesting blog this morning, courtesy of Hanan at Growabrain. The blog is called "The Good Reverend", and a quick perusal of the front page should remind you of a blog written by a rotund little fellow who lives in a big red house. Growabrain was linking to a post called "A Thinly-Veiled Allegory", but the post right before it caught my interest a lot more.
In it, "The Good Reverend" considers the idea that teenagers should be granted status as legal adults if they can demonstrate competency. At the end of the post, he comes down against the proposition, but the post links to a book by psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein which argues in favor of the idea (as well as a similar magazine article that considers the historical context of the birth of "teen culture and a Time article that argues against Epstein's propositions). I am leaving the links out of this post to get you to go read his post, which does link all this material. The blog post is further enhanced by a comment from Epstein himself, who refutes the way The Good Reverend characterizes his ideas and points readers to his own website so they can read about it first-hand.
In his rebuttal, Epstein asserts that his interest is not in giving adolescents legal equivalency to adults, but to acknowledge that by the time most people are teenagers they do indeed possess abilities and competencies suitable for adult behaviors and roles, and, more importantly to use this acknowledgement to break away from our society's infantilization of adolescents. Treating adolscents as incompetent, helpless children undercuts the further development of their adult faculties -- a phenomenon spreading into our culture in general as young adults take longer and longer to assume "mature" responsibilities and roles.
Not long after I read through all the links this morning, I went out for lunch and arrived at a nearby Wendy's to find it overrun with middle-school-aged adolescents out of school for a half-day. With all of this freshly in mind, it was interesting to watch all of these kids and their interactions. I presume the average age of the kids I saw was 13, given that they came from the middle school across the street, and even at 13 they do indeed blur a lot of distinctions between adult and child. One observation I almost always have about adolescents in general is their ease at jumping back and forth across this border as the situation requires -- behaving more childlike for parents and behaving more like adults when on their own. It's not hard to see Epstein's rationales when they're played right in front of your face -- the business of parents keeping their children trapped in childhood teaches the adolescent the value of duplicity and sends harmful messages about the inevitability of adulthood.
The criticism being levelled at Epstein is really aimed at the libertarian political nature of some of his arguments, I think. In the end, I don't think I would agree with formalizing an institutional process for legally recognizing adolescents as adults simply on the basis of competency exams, but I do agree with the idea that our culture as a whole should seriously revisit the way we deal with our older children in a way that stops isolating them and pushing them into maladaptive behaviors that linger into early adulthood.
As you know, I have one of these at home right now and based on my experiences with her, I can tell you that teens are the very definition of schizophrenia. They do float back and forth across that magical line of maturity. I think attempting to paint them all with one brush of a defined "legal age" is ridiculous. Teens vary so much in their developmental stages that they need to be met where they are rather than remanded to where they should be. It's much like expecting that all one year old babies should be forced to walk at 12 months or be left to their own devices until they figure it out. This way of thinking is basically what is wrong with the current school system...it's based on performance markers rather than developmental stages.
Posted by Karan [URL] at 05/ 8/07
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