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Why childhood is getting longer
Technology, demography and culture are all pushing society to extend how long people are considered young for
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Policy, politics and culture will trend towards treating those whom we once saw as young adults as children.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
Stephen Bush
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When is someone no longer a child? It’s something that no society seems to have a consistent position on. In the United States, 18-year-olds can vote, purchase a gun, and saddle themselves up with untold amounts of tuition fee debt, but they cannot buy a drink. In Japan, a 19-year-old was not considered a legal adult until 2022, but a 13-year-old could have consensual sex with a 55-year-old until June 2023. You had to be 19 to vote in South Korea until 2020 – a year older than you have to be to get married.
Very few of us have a consistent position on this ourselves. If I am wrangling with my mother about whether to let me pay the bill at a restaurant, I feel frustrated at how difficult it is to escape the box marked “child”. When I realise that some of my colleagues were born in the 21st century, I struggle to suppress the urge to assert the fact I am still young. And if I bump into an old friend’s younger siblings, no matter how high-powered they may now be, I find it hard to shake the sense that they are lost children who need to be looked after. Those ambiguities and contradictions are part of why states find it so hard to legislate on when exactly it is that adulthood begins.
