Name: 24.
Appearance: Fresh-faced, ready for anything.
Is this that old TV show about Kiefer Sutherland torturing people in a hurry? No. It’s the age itself: 24 years old.
Ah, I remember being 24. WhatsApp was a shilling a message back then, you know. Creme Eggs as big as pigeons. Yes, well we all remember adolescence differently.
Adolescence? I thought we were talking about my mid-20s? We are. Twenty-four is the last year of adolescence.
Says who? Experts.
Not them again. They’ll say anything to get into the news. I know, but this time they have a point. A group of researchers in Australia, led by Prof Susan Sawyer, argue in the Lancet that “a definition of 10-24 years corresponds more closely to adolescent growth and popular understandings of this life phase”.
So you spend 14 years being a teenager? Fifteen, if it starts on your 10th birthday and ends on your 25th.
Is there evidence to support this wacky suggestion? There is. Thanks to improved living standards, puberty in the developed world now starts at 10 on average, rather than 14.
Crikey! No wonder there are so many new shaving companies. And research now shows that the brain continues developing well into a person’s 20s.
Is that why students are a bit daft? It could be. And people generally marry and have children later – on average in their early 30s, so there’s still a window between the end of adolescence and full-blown responsible adulthood.
Ah, yes, “the good bit”, I believe it’s called. So the message is we should stop treating 24-year-olds like adults? Ariana Grande and Harry Kane are still children, really. That isn’t quite the message, no. “An expanded and more inclusive definition of adolescence is essential for developmentally appropriate framing of laws, social policies and service systems,” say Sawyer and chums.
Like raising the voting age to 25? Not really. More like lengthening the period when young people get help from the state.
It’s mollycoddling! It also makes sense. Humans are such brainy animals that we’ve always needed a long childhood in which to learn. I suppose the world has got brainier.
It doesn’t always feel like it. Indeed.
Do say: “Young people today have no respect. I’m old enough to be their brother!”
Don’t say: “No more than two 24-year-olds in this shop at one time.”
