One of the most pernicious myths of the modern era is the idea that the human brain isn’t fully mature until age 25 or 26. The people promoting this idea point to brain scans showing that the frontal lobe is smaller in teenagers and young adults than in older adults. However, I’ve never heard any of them propound a good theory on why the young adults of the past were able to make sound, future-oriented choices.
It’s gotten to the point where I’ve heard some speak seriously of “children” in college. Not the more general “kids,” and not in reference to the speaker’s own offspring … some have begun to take seriously the absurd idea that a group of people who are largely ages 18-22 are “children.” In the past, people younger than 23 have led armies.
It seems intuitively obvious to me that the frontal lobes are not undeveloped; they’re atrophied. We’ve infantilized our young to such an extent that they no longer can develop these skills. Notice how the official age when we’re finally mature keeps going upward? The age of so-called maturity keeps being raised, but it’s always several years after the rest of us have finally started to allow them a little autonomy.
Imagine some eager person observing that one-year-olds often fall down, and that three-year-olds fall much less often. This person decides that the toddlers are bad at walking because they’re not developmentally ready yet. Somehow others are talked into this, and the culture begins keeping one-year-olds and two-year-olds in strollers full-time, until they’re declared chronologically qualified on their third birthdays.
Now imagine those three-year-olds trying to walk.
Their legs were exercised in preparation, but their brains have no idea how to manage the task of swinging from one foot to the other. They fall down a lot.
At this point, the culture has forgotten that one-year-olds used to walk. They decide that three-year-olds must still not be old enough, and the next generation isn’t allowed to try until they’re six. They fall down a lot.
Give it a while longer, and now nobody’s allowed to walk until age twelve. Meanwhile, our entire culture has become clumsier, less graceful, less athletic, because our formative years were spent sitting and waiting.
We think this is normal. We don’t believe the old tales of how ten-year-olds used to play baseball ― why, that’s a hard task for adults! The idea of children doing it must be a myth.
Ridiculous? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. In some European countries, for example, people think that children “can’t” learn to read until they’re nine or ten years old. They’re aware of children reading earlier in other parts of the world, but they seem to think that the children are being forced and possibly even damaged somehow. What they see around them is that eight-year-olds can’t read well, and most people just don’t have enough separation from their own culture to realize that something which seems normal right here is actually rather weird overall.
People who read well usually started reading earlier than age ten.
People who walk well usually started walking earlier than age twelve.
People who solve problems and make decisions well usually started solving problems and making decisions earlier than age twenty-six.
Genuine brain development appears to finish up around age 12-14. Absent other factors, that’s also when we reach reproductive puberty. This is not a coincidence. That’s when we become fully developed human organisms.
We will continue to learn and change, and that will lead to small brain changes, but this process continues throughout our lives. It’s called “neuroplasticity.” If a person’s brain must be beyond change for that person to count as mature, then the only mature people are corpses.