Follow Up on 'Growing Up'

[lillibet]

I wanted to thank all of you for your participation and thoughtful discussion in my 'Growing Up' poll. Rather than reply individually to comments, I thought I'd compile some of my thoughts in a separate post.

First of all, let me explain that all of the things I listed are items that have been cited to me as evidence of immaturity by other people, not necessarily things that I agree are signs thereof. Over the years I've heard "well, s/he's young" given as a way of excusing various behaviors and have been amused to watch this applied to ever-older people as my friends and I age. I completely agree that there's no particular cut-off in the process--I'm certainly still growing and changing and watching even my octogenarian parents learn and adapt, so I have every reason to believe that it never stops.

I was intrigued by the results of the poll, especially that there was such a strong spike for "25" and that some things that I was frequently told were signs of immaturity when I was younger--and that I do seem to have mostly left behind--don't seem to be considered such by my respondents.

While I agree with several commenters that maturity is more of a gestalt than a tick-list, I think that what we tend to judge in others often comes down to specific instances. And while there are certainly many other possible explanations for these behaviors, having heard them repeatedly excused as immaturity leads me to think that's at least perceived as a leading cause.

There are also a lot of things that didn't make the list. I did try to break out "accepting consequences" and "having your shit together" into more specific examples, mostly to avoid the need for discussion about what those would entail. One of the areas I didn't really touch on (partly because of option-constraints) is judgmental-ness or open-mindedness, or the tendency to prefer black & white answers.

One of the things that didn't really emerge in the conversation, but that I've found myself thinking about, is the wide variation in experience and the uneven development of most people. The summer that I was the wise old age of 18 one of the people in my gang was 15. Most of the time that made no difference at all, but several times people commented to me that while in general they found her very cool, occasionally they'd find themselves wondering why she was being so incredibly immature before remembering that she was, in fact, much younger than we were. I'm sure that many of the older people I've spent time through the years have had much the same reaction to me.

Thanks again for an interesting discussion. Always a pleasure.

Comments

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

Another story about variable maturity:

A couple summers ago, I was shelling peas with my mom, dad and sister and her son Jonas. He was too little to start the pea, but if a grown up popped the shell, he would carefully and diligently take the peas out of the pod and put them into the kettle. He was working away with everyone else, and then he put a shell in with the peas. "No, no," I said, "the shells go in the bag."

Kirsten glared at me. "He's two," she said.

He was behaving in such a controlled, mature way that I had quite forgotten that he was only a toddler, so of course he would get confused.

[starphire.livejournal.com]

One other thing that I meant to add in a comment to the original post:
There has been an ongoing tendency to extend the ages of youth/childhood in our society. So what might have been generally viewed as immaturity for an 18 year old 100 years ago might not be considered immature until after age 25 today.
Just another reason why I didn't go along with any particular age cutoff in the poll.

[roozle.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this even though I didn't comment before. It seees to me that immature and mature are correlated more with instability and rapid change on the immature side, and stability and a more consistent approach to things on the mature side. Self-awareness seems to me to be almost a different dimension altogether. It seems to me that you can be functionally mature in almost every way and still have little capacity to reflect on your own behavior or, y'know, vice-versa.