Question My younger brother, who is 13, is arguing that he will not go through any drastic changes in personality and mannerisms from now until the future and therefore a child is no different from an adult. I argued in the contrary stating that he will go through a lot of changes that might radically alter his outlook on life and personality. Is this correct or does it vary from person to person?

Accepted:
July 31, 2008

Comments

If I have it right, your brother thinks he won't change much, because he thinks that people in general don't change much from teen years to adulthood. He then goes on to draw a conclusion: children (or at least, teenagers) aren't really any different from adults. So we have two questions. First, is the premise true? Is your brother really right when he says that people who have reached the ripe old age of 13 are pretty much as they will be as adults? That's not a philosopher's question as such, though I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that many people change a good deal after they get past their teen years. But there's another question: even if we granted your brother his premise, what about his conclusion?

It would depend, wouldn't it? It may be that people's basic personality (cheerful or prickly or inclined to fuss-budgetry...) is set by the time they reach their teen years. And it's pretty plausible that mannerisms are laid down early. But I'm guessing your brother thinks his argument gets him quite a bit more: the right to adult privileges. That's not so clear. Even if thirteen-year-olds are in many ways like the adults they will become, there's something else we can say: the parts of the brain that govern decision-making and planning (the frontal lobes) aren't ready for the corner office and the keys to the liquor cabinet. If you click here or here, you can see a couple of the many hits that a bit of googling will come up with on this topic.

This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's spent a lot of time around adolescents (not least the parents among us!) or has a good memory for their own teen years. The science is simply giving us the "why" behind something we already knew.

There are exceptions, of course. Some thirteen-year-olds are remarkably mature. Maybe your brother is one of them, though the fact that he thinks so doesn't exactly distinguish him from his peer group. But his rough-and-ready generalization doesn't get him where he wants to go, as he'll likely agree himself in 20 or 30 years.