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Studies have shown that there is very little difference between the decision making capabilities of 14-17 year olds regarding medical treatment decisions as compared to those who have reached legal majority...the APA testified in Hodgson v. Minnesota to this effect. Based on a large body of research, the decision making capacity of a person is remarkably indistinguishable from adult levels by age 14.
Furthermore, it is far from obvious why it should be necessary for a person's decision making process to be fully developed rather than adequately developed. To make a questionable analogy that might still be useful, the average male isn't their full adult height until about age 18 and the average female not until about age 15 or 16, however, most of us were probably wearing adult-size clothing at least a year or two before we stopped growing, if not more. This is because someone who is (say) 95% of their full height is "close enough" to be a good fit, even though there is still the last 5%.
Why can we not use the same logic for mental development as for physical dimensions....in other words even if your brain is not fully developed, might 95% be good enough? Why or why not?
So if someone's medical decisions are at adult levels by age 14, let's say we should lower the age of medical consent from 18 to 13, presumably because (as in the clothing analogy) there might be some concept of "close enough".
Similarly, I'll argue that we should lower the age at which a person can work without parental consent from 18 or 16, down to 13, as long as the work does not interfere with school and as long as there is no reason for believing that workplace exploitation is taking place. The horrors of the sweat-shops during the Industrial Revolution can be avoided in a number of ways that don't require a strict and dogmatic all-or-nothing approach toward the labor of young people. There is a HUGE difference between a sweatshop and a 13-year-old working at, say, the local computer store after school. People keep using the historical sweatshops as an argument against this, but this is, I argue, beyond disingenuous. So let's let them work as long as they are keeping up OK in school. I would argue that if their GPA does not drop below (say) a 2.5 they should be allowed to work for up to 2 hours on school days (after school time), up to 6 hours on a weekend day, and unlimited hours during summer. If the student fails any courses or has poor grades, the school would report to the appropriate agency to suspend the employment until the student's academic situation has stabilized.
I also don't see any good reason not to lower the voting age to 13, using similar logic as discussed for medical treatment, or the age at which one can obtain a bank account or sign a lease without parental consent. However, banks and landlords should be free to require a young person to have the income, otherwise they would be signing their parents up for an obligation behind their back, and this is absolutely wrong, I think we can all agree.
I am not arguing that the parental financial support obligation should end before age 18. And parents should only be required to provide the basic necessities, NOT cell phones, TV, a separate housing unit, a car, etc. These must be earned, they are not necessities. I absolutely do NOT support requiring parents to provide any of these things, period!
I will not discuss the age of sexual consent, the drinking or smoking or gambling or gun age, or the military age, or the marriage age. In fact let's not even discuss the driving age. These are very complex issues and I don't want to get into them. If you want to discuss them among yourself, fine, but I will refrain from taking a position on any of those. Frankly I don't see them as important, because I don't see them as basic civil liberties. If you ask, I will simply remind you that I don't care, because, well, I really don't.
I will consider some counter-arguments and explain why I don't think they should be convincing. First is the "lack of life experience" (LOLE) argument, namely, that the life experience of adolescents is too limited for them to reliably make decisions in their best interest. There are a number of problems with the LOLE argument, the first being that no matter what age you start at, you will always be inexperienced. If you make a person wait until they have Y years of experience before they are allowed to do X, the no one ever will do X, because they cannot get the experience unless they are allowed at some point to do it despite a lack of experience. In other words, you have to start sometime, you cannot magically gain experience without being allowed to do the activity. Forcing a person to delay the start in order to gain non-existent experience is irrational to say the least. Another problem with the LOLE argument is that the lack of experience is not as limiting on a person's judgment as the argument seems to imply - again going back to psychological studies, the 14-year-olds have the same decisional maturity as a 56-year-old, even though a 56-year-old has lived quadruple as long. Why is this? There are a number of explanations but suffice it to say that the APA's body of evidence makes a convincing case. It is also an interesting subject to discuss what requires maturity vs. what requires wisdom. A lot of people using this argument don't seem to distinguish between wisdom and maturity.
Another common counter is the "brain development" (BD) argument. This argument is based on the fact that a large body of imaging studies have shown that the myelination of the brain occurs starting near the back of the brain and is not complete in the frontal lobes until sometime in a person's 20s. This is absolutely an empirical fact. However, it scarcely tells us anything about decision-making ability, because we don't really understand how the physical parameters of the brain affect decision making in this context. For example, why is a 13 - 14-year-old with an "underdevloped" brain still competently able to make medical decisions? The fact is that we simply do not know from empirical data how much white matter is actually necessary to make a rational decision, so it is a huge "leap of faith" to conclude based on a lack of white matter that someone's decisional process is inadequate. To give an extreme example, hemisherectomy patients only have, literally, half a brain, yet they can adapt to function in a remarkably normal fashion if the operation was performed at an early age. So if a hemispherectomy patient can make do on 50% of the normal amount of white matter, why can an adolescent not make do on 80% or 90% the amount as an adult? There must be some independent reason for thinking they can't.
Another problem with the BD argument is that it is inconsistent with the cognitive standards used to assess competence in a court of law. If we want to claim to not be prejudiced, then we should use the same standards to assess competence in teens and adults. This is to say, if you took the average 13-year-old into court and presented only data from cognitive function, it should be possible to declare them legally incompetent. If it is not, then it is prejudice not to lower the age of majority to 13, plain and simple. In fact the traditional standard for clinical mental incapacity has been an IQ of 70. This is calculated as mental age/chronological age times 100, with chronological age topping out at 15 or 16 depending on source. If we use 16, then the average 13-year-old scores a (13/16)*100 = 81.25. For these two reasons, I argue that the brain development argument is not convincing.
The third common counter I see is the economic argument - "If you aren't paying the bills, then why should you be granted the rights of an adult?". There are a number of problems with the argument but the most glaring flaw is that it is highly prejudiced and discriminatory. To see why this is so, consider a number of other classes of people who are unable to financially support themselves - those with a broken leg, those who lost their job during a recession, those who are a stay at home parent, etc. Would you argue that since they aren't paying the bills, that therefore they should not be able to sign a cell phone contract, not be able to get medical care without the consent of their financial providers, or that they should be deprived of the right to vote? If not, then the economic argument is at best inconsistent and irrationally prejudiced.
To summarize:
1) There are good, sound reasons to allow automatic partial emancipation of teenagers by granting the right to vote, work, sign binding contracts, and consent to medical treatment.
2) Three common arguments counter to this are deeply flawed and do not succeed - namely, the lack of life experience" argument, the brain development argument, and the economic argument.
3)Therefore we should partially emancipate young people beginning at 13 years of age.
I'm sorry, but despite what you cite, that's the age group I worked with my whole adult life, and I don't agree that they are ready to be partially emancipated. The highest number of school suspensions generally occur at ages 12, 13, and 14, and then begin to gradually subside over the next 3 years. There's a reason for that.
I also don't agree with partial emancipation. Either you're adult, or you're not. 18 seems to be a good average age for it, and in my view that should include drinking and all other accepted "adult" behaviors.
Studies have shown that there is very little difference between the decision making capabilities of 14-17 year olds regarding medical treatment decisions as compared to those who have reached legal majority...the APA testified in Hodgson v. Minnesota to this effect. Based on a large body of research, the decision making capacity of a person is remarkably indistinguishable from adult levels by age 14.....
If there is, indeed, really a "large body of research" to support the sentence that I have put in bold above, then it explains why most adults do not seem in fact very grown up emotionally nor in their world view. And while they may accumulate life experience, it doesn't necessarily modify either of those.
Something I have felt to be the case for many decades before reading this posting.
Do you not remember being 14? I remember being 14. Clearly. And no, I was not in any way capable of making any good decision that might impact the rest of my life. Jesus. The difference in decision making capacity between a 14 year old and an 18 year old is miles apart. If the studies show differently, then they are wrong.
Do you not remember being 14? I remember being 14. Clearly. And no, I was not in any way capable of making any good decision that might impact the rest of my life. Jesus. The difference in decision making capacity between a 14 year old and an 18 year old is miles apart. If the studies show differently, then they are wrong.
I agree. About the only people who think 14 year-olds are mature and adult-like are 14 year olds. My life was a disaster at age 14, and much of it was my own doing. I certainly didn't get my act together until I was maybe in my first year in college...sort of. And most of my friends took longer than that.
Do you not remember being 14? I remember being 14. Clearly. And no, I was not in any way capable of making any good decision that might impact the rest of my life. Jesus. The difference in decision making capacity between a 14 year old and an 18 year old is miles apart. If the studies show differently, then they are wrong.
Perhaps I was in a bit of an unusual position at that age, but my parents did not treat me as a child at all. They did not demand to know who my friends were, did not ground me, nor did they tell me what activities I could and could not do after school. They didn't even set a bedtime or tell me I had to do my homework!
And looking back, it seems to have turned out fine. I knew how to avoid sketchy people even as a 7th grader. I had plenty of online email discussions but contrary to what some parents think I actually knew how to avoid giving personal info out or meeting dangerous people. And I always found out for myself what my grades needed to be in school to get into various programs. My parents didn't do it for me, I did it myself. Yes, at 13! And yes, I knew when I needed to go to bed in order to not be sleepy the next day. In Western culture it is weird, I realize this, but is can be very workable. With quite a lot of autonomy, I graduated high school on time (at 18) with a 3.7 GPA and a full scholarship. That my parents respected my decisions almost no matter what, I think some of you would say was negligent - but it was perfect! And no, I didn't become alcoholic or develop drug or gambling problems. Heck no!
I think that there are a lot of young people in our culture that have been conditioned to think they are "not supposed" to have adult levels of responsibility in their early teens, and this is very unhealthy because it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Else how do you explain why in Western culture we have so many of these issues yet in other cultures especially if you go further back in history people were allowed to make more decisions in their teens and yet didn't get into trouble?
Adolescence is really a recent invention in Western culture. Ok you may say the studies are wrong but how do you explain people being kings or army captains at 15 years old?
If there is, indeed, really a "large body of research" to support the sentence that I have put in bold above, then it explains why most adults do not seem in fact very grown up emotionally nor in their world view. And while they may accumulate life experience, it doesn't necessarily modify that.
Something I have felt to be the case for many decades before reading this posting.
This is a separate issue but the fact is that personal responsibility is heavily culturally (and sub-culturally) modulated in a lot of ways, for both teens and adults. I am not denying that there are irresponsible people, only that the difference in responsibility between typical teenager and adult is simply not sufficient to justify snatching away basic self-determination at the legal or household level.
I'm sorry, but despite what you cite, that's the age group I worked with my whole adult life, and I don't agree that they are ready to be partially emancipated. The highest number of school suspensions generally occur at ages 12, 13, and 14, and then begin to gradually subside over the next 3 years. There's a reason for that.
I also don't agree with partial emancipation. Either you're adult, or you're not. 18 seems to be a good average age for it, and in my view that should include drinking and all other accepted "adult" behaviors.
1. School suspensions? How do you get from there to the conclusion that the innate decision-making capacity or lack thereof is the sole explanation? You'd need to compare the offenses that the suspensions resulted from, not simply the suspensions themselves. But even ignoring this, if I showed that one group of people got fired from their jobs more than another, that would scarcely justify snatching away their right to vote or consent to medical treatment. For example, if people within 6 months of a divorce turned out to be 50% more likely to be fired, would this justify barring them from voting or consenting to medical treatment or signing a legal contract? The fact that you are using a school suspension as an argument to treat them as children seems amazingly petty in relation to other cases. While I realize that you may mean well, I would argue that you are harboring a significant double standard by making an inference from suspension rates to the level of autonomy someone should be given.
2. What's wrong with partial emancipation? Just because someone is economically dependent on others doesn't mean they must be denied self-determination. That's like saying someone that lost their job due to a redundancy should be denied the right to consent to medical treatment. It just does not follow. Again I argue that you have a double standard.
....Adolescence is really a recent invention in Western culture. Ok you may say the studies are wrong but how do you explain people being kings or army captains at 15 years old?
I think you should check out a course in comparative anthropology, as well history. Various life stage have had to be crammed into much shorter life spans for one thing for much of human history.
And, while, as I have already pointed out that most "grown ups" are hardly that at all, I don't believe that we could make the changes you discussed in your OP in regard to adolescents without making many others. And you have cherry-picked a bit too much perhaps. If a kid can do the work of his own choice at 14 and vote for the leaders of the town/state/and country; then one should be able to kick his ass out of the family home at the same age.
I think you should check out a course in comparative anthropology, as well history. Various life stage have had to be crammed into much shorter life spans for one thing for much of human history.
And, while, as I have already pointed out that most "grown ups" are hardly that at all, I don't believe that we could make the changes you discussed in your OP in regard to adolescents without making many others. And you have cherry-picked a bit too much perhaps. If a kid can do the work of his own choice at 14 and vote for the leaders of the town/state/and country; then one should be able to kick his ass out of the family home at the same age.
Ok the lifespan was shorter but so what? Are you arguing that a longer lifespan actually slows down the rate of maturation or simply that we extend childhood past puberty because it isn't "out of necessity" to grow up as fast? The problem with the latter view is once you concede it is even possible for people to be so responsible at an early age, then you have to treat it not as a maturity issue or a developmental issue but as an economic cost/benefit trade-off. It is a different type of discussion entirely.
And why should the right to vote and consent to medical treatment mean parents should be able to kick a person out? We don't snatch those rights away from a person with a broken leg or otherwise unable to work for a number of other reasons, are you arguing that this means we should force them to work? Why is the case with young people any different?
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