Age
See also: Age of majorityWhile 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.
Read more about this topic: Maturity (psychological)
Famous quotes containing the word age:
“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.”
—John Mortimer (b. 1923)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)