When does a kid become a grownup?

[justcarol67]

Lee wrote:
<snip>
> As strange as this may sound, I'm not averse to 18, but I can't help
wondering if some kind of course should be required...something that deals with real-life goals and expectations, financial awareness, adult life skills, etc.  Too many young people enter adulthood knowing little or nothing of the real world, so to speak, and end up in trouble of one type or another.  Perhaps it should be a mandatory High School course in the final semester...I don' know...but just some of my thoughts.
<snip>

Carol responds:

I agree. First, I not sure whether step-by-step adulthood is a good thing or not. In Arizona, for example, you can drive alone at sixteen (if you have a license and no other teenagers in the car unless there's also an adult); vote, get married, or join the military) at eighteen (which is also the age of consent for sexual relations; but not smoke or drink till twenty-one. Is it a good thing or a bad thing to have adulthood come gradually, and, if so, aren't we a bit confused in our priorities? At any rate, I, for one, thing that sixteen is ridiculously young to be the age of consent for sexual relations (heterosexual or homosexual), however realistic it may be, but if you can have sexual relations, you ought to be able to marry (and, certainly, to obtain birth control since few sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds are ready to be parents). And if we give kids responsibilities, such as voting, the right to marry, or the right to hold full-time employment (not to mention the obligation to pay taxes), they certainly ought to be prepared for it. For one thing, they should be required to take a consumer math course. And maybe those classes where they're required to take care of a realistic looking fake baby that actually cries should be required, too. It doesn't make sense that we have (relatively) early ages of majority but prolonged adolescence.

Does anyone know whether Israel still drafts all eighteen-year-olds to perform some sort of government service (not necessarily military)? That seems like a good idea to me. And maybe there ought to be a law to keep them all in school till graduation or their eighteenth birthday, whichever comes first, instead of allowing sixteen-year-olds to drop out with no place to go and nothing to do except loll around the house and play video games or join a gang.

It's not just the legal confusion over what constitutes the legal age (which we can see is all over the place) that concerns me; it's whether the kids are emotionally and legally ready to be adults. It must be a huge burden for an eighteen-year-old to have to give up adolescence (where he or she still fits emotionally) and become an adult. I know that I was eager to go to college and live in a dorm, but I was also just five miles from home and could come home on weekends if I wanted to. I also had to learn on my own how to balance a checkbook. ("I still have checks left in my checkbook? How can I be overdrawn?")

Oh, well. I just think it's a huge problem that nobody thinks about except the kids who are faced with it. They need to be prepared and many of them aren't.

Carol, who wasn't talking about when a kid becomes an adult legally but when a kid is ready to become a grownup mentally and emotionally