Immature?
When did “young people” become a term anyone has used?
Was watching Traffic Cops t'other day, PC said that he was extra concerned about a pedestrian in an RTC, because she was 16, and 'Children suffer worse injuries than adults". 16 year olds suffer worse than 50 year olds?
There's some double thinking going on about kids in our society, couple of popular books written on the subject in recent times. We infantilise them and inadvertantly abuse them instead of accepting the reality about how mature and whole people are at the various ages.
Has nothing to do with age of consent, it's more about taking away, or forgetting completely about, the right that they were once given, to be thought of as valuable, thinking, feeling creatures with their own minds. And it's harmful. We stop seeing them as they are, or could be. Refuse to treat the real thing, and instead use them to act out this fantasy that briefly makes us feel better, before almost always making us feel worse about real life.
Then they turn 18, and take away the label, all the protections and drop them into a world that treats people as exploitable lumps of meat.
The argument is we are sentimentalising the idea of a kid to compensate for how harsh that world is, things like our disappointment with life, the harshness of our experience at times growing up, and modern stuff like the ubiquity of porn make us unhappy..... so we escape reality by idealising children's innocence and specialness.
It's bollocks. I wasn't raised like that, they invested in me, supported me, gave me guidance but told me to make my own mind up, in a way that today's kids don't, because they are stuffed into classes twice the size they were back in my day, taught to pass tests and little else, by a country that only really cares that they are ready to be used by the economy.
