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3:59am June 9, 2013

I’m moving this response off of the thread about kids because it does not belong there.

Someone said that they’d never really heard of anyone calling adolescents children. My response:

That’s not true for what I’ve seen. People constantly refer to people much older than the average age of puberty as kids or children or girls or boys, and I see no problem in doing that, provided they’re not adults in their culture. I was certainly a kid long past the age of 11, which is when my period started. And many kids go through puberty even younger than that. When teenagers die, or other bad things happen to them, you hear “they were just a kid” more often than not, whether they’ve gone through puberty or not. I just don’t see it as even remotely wrong or offensive to call adolescents kids, and neither do most people I interact with. I actually find it really strange that you’ve never encountered that, given that I encounter it practically everywhere. After puberty I still went to a child psychiatrist, a pediatric dentist, and otherwise always the children’s side of any medical practitioners I saw, not the adult side. Sometimes they divided children up into younger children and adolescents, but they never ever claimed adolescents weren’t children. And often I got placed with the younger children rather than adolescents despite my age, because they were flexible about that (only a tiny handful of the oldest adolescents ever, ever got put in with adults, but many adolescents were put in with younger children, because we were CHILDREN). I also don’t remember any changes that went with puberty for me that would have truly taken me out of childhood and made me an adult, whereas adulthood went with a lot of changes that absolutely did. There were emotional changes with adolescence but it definitely still felt like childhood, just childhood with a lot more hormones attached. It was only after all that began to settle down that I could say I felt remotely adult. And even then it didn’t fully settle down until I was maybe 25, which I’m told is normal.

I know all these categories are culturally determined and all, but I see a lot of problems in the culture I am actually in, with assuming that people stop childhood the moment they go through puberty. Especially assuming that across the board. I can say my ability to understand and make decisions about things and all that didn’t happen until I hit adulthood, and if anyone had assumed I could make adult decisions as an adolescent it would have been utterly disastrous. There’s a reason that we aren’t supposed to try adolescents as adults, for instance. And that when it happens that we do, it’s an utterly horrible thing. Because adolescents still have brains that work like other children’s brains in many ways, including snapping under severe stress in ways that are less common in adults, and doing things that few adults would do no matter what the situation. I’ve experienced that personally and I wasn’t able to change it until young adulthood, which is about when that change takes effect for most people.

I understand that some people feel differently about this, but most people I know call adolescents kids or children constantly and that’s not a horrible thing nor an uncommon thing. Even very young adults are sometimes referred to as kids, although that’s less common. But it’s very common to refer to adolescents that way. And comparing myself as a child, adolescent, and adult, I can say that I don’t feel like I suddenly became an adult at the age of 11-13, which is when puberty happened for me, but I do feel like I did around the age of 19 or 20. The changes that happened with puberty felt like childhood plus hugely disrupted emotions and cognition and an altered body shape, not like an early form of adulthood.

Not that any of this is actually relevant to the thread it came from. It’s just that I couldn’t not respond to the idea that its very uncommon to see adolescents as children. Practically everyone I know sees them as children, and I definitely see myself in adolescence as by far more child than adult. Chaotic emotions, higher sex drive, and the beginnings of some other brain changes, but not much increase in actual maturity. Whereas when I turned adult there was an enormous increase in maturity, despite still having several years to go before I’d call myself mature.