Maturity (psychological) - Age

Age

See also: Age of majority

While older persons are generally perceived as more mature, psychological maturity is not determined by one's age. However, for legal purposes, people are not considered psychologically mature enough to perform certain tasks (such as driving, consenting to sex, signing a binding contract or making medical decisions) until they have reached a certain age. In fact, judge Julian Mack, who helped create the juvenile court system in the United States, said that juvenile justice was based on the belief that young people do not always make good decisions because they are not mature, but this means that they can be reformed more easily than adults. However, the relationship between psychological maturity and age is a difficult one, and there has been much debate over methods of determining maturity, considering its subjective nature, relativity to the current environment and/or other factors, and especially regarding social issues such as religion, politics, human stem-cell research, genetic engineering and abortion.

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Famous quotes containing the word age:

    “Even such is Time, which takes in trust
    Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
    And pays us but with age and dust,
    Who in the dark and silent grave
    When we have wandered all our ways
    Shuts up the story of our days.
    And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
    The Lord shall raise me up I trust.”
    —Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618)

    “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
    —Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    “Provence,
    The Renascence, the age of Pericles, each
    A broad, rich-carpeted stair to pride
    With manhood now the cost they’re easy to follow
    For the ways taken are all notorious,
    Lettered, sculptured, and rhymed....”
    —Allen Tate (1899–1979)