The age 25 thing is basically a myth. Different brain processes do continue developing into adulthood, but many finish developing younger while others never finish developing.
> When we spoke, I told Steinberg his work had been referenced in this way. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. I then asked whether he had insights about where the figure 25 came from, and he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. “I honestly don’t know why people picked 25,” he said. “It’s a nice-sounding number? It’s divisible by five?”
> Kate Mills, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, was equally puzzled. “This is funny to me—I don’t know why 25,” Mills said. “We’re still not there with research to really say the brain is mature at 25, because we still don’t have a good indication of what maturity even looks like.”
No, my issue is that people are implicitly or more often explicitly saying that folks shouldn't be allowed to make decisions for themselves or be responsible for their actions until they're 25. The progressive infantilization of people troubles me. That you have to spend a third of your life in this state is ridiculous. It is also self-fulfilling. People only stop acting like children when you stop treating them like children.
I agree with your general position. Not a fan of babying people either. Still, I know a lot of people (mostly young men with minimal parental guidance) who were total idiots up to about 25 that could’ve benefited from a program like this. I much prefer stuff like this (total-immersion skill-creation programs) to EBT and section 8. I don’t see what benefit there is to the state to have an age cutoff. Just take people who want to be self sufficient
Agreed with the general thrust here; I read something recently from a scientist in the field that the 25 number is completely made up. It doesn’t come from any objective metric.
That said the idea that you do most of your growing up before 25, but still do some of it 18-24 should not be controversial. I wouldn’t use that observation to deny education/apprenticeship benefits from anyone though.
Pithy quotes don't drive policy, science does. We can preach tough love as much as we want but it doesn't change the physical reality of adolescent brain morphometry.
We shouldn’t treat people like children into their 24’s, but we should generally be more forgiving—reduce punishments for victimless crimes, make it easier to get out of debt, better social safety net.
There isn’t some magic age where we suddenly stop screwing up all the time.
If anything, it's a correction and we'll get to where we need to be eventually. We went from kids being coal miners to crippling entire generations with debt that they can't get out of with lifespans that are shrinking.
Plenty of people manage to make it to much later in life without connecting those dots for themselves.
About the most one could say about 25 is that it's when people's paths start to radically diverge, even amongst the group of people that were previously lumped together as "high achievers." So perhaps the subset of that group who are relatively low-performing — and yet, somehow, high in self-awareness — will wake up and start making changes at 25.
> The progressive infantilization of people troubles me
Since you're making this political I'd like to point out that it is conservatives that have started a movement to repeal the 26th amendment and raise the voting age.
i believe you've misinterpreted the meaning of the word progressive here to refer to political progressives, rather than simply just "gradual/ongoing" which is what the use of it here suggests to me personally
