An addendum to this is "can you be held financially responsible". As in, if a 12 year old wrecks a car or beaks windows out of an empty building, who is considered "responsible for the costs to repair/replace?"
Parents are the adults because its expected that they would have an ability to pay for damages while a kid isn't likely to have an income to pay for anything. So when you turn 18 and do something where you owe money, they come after you first with the expectation of repayment instead of your previous guardians.
In England, you cannot buy alcohol unless you are 18 or over. But otherwise yep, age of consent is 16, and it doesn't seem to cause any major issues.
It is actually legal here for anyone 5 or over to consume alcohol, so long as they didn't buy it.
Brit here, I had my first beer when I was 9 lol. But I'm pretty sure I tasted beer before that, there's a photo of me as a baby where my grandmas is pretending (hopefully!) to be giving me a sip of beer.
Its probably healthier to drink a can of beer than a can of coke. And i say this as someone that loves coke and does not drink alcohol.
But arent kids suposed to love cod flavored beer?
as a fellow elder zoomer i feel ur pain. my gf if less than 3 years younger than me and calls me a 30 yr old :( im less than 25 years old
On the other hand the idea of 16 year olds binge drinking ... turns my stomach
kinda sweet you think we wait til we're 16 lol
Yeah lol. By the time I hit what Americans call middle school (grades 7-9) people were already talking about trying to sneak into clubs and get drunk lol. Especially in the later grades.
I think we should be tying things to net worth. If you have a net worth of a million dollars, you have to do the things you don't want to do, and you're no longer allowed to do the things you want to do.
If you're rich, you're not allowed to vote, get married, or drink alcohol, but you do get drafted and have to pay taxes.
I don't have an opinion on specific ages but I think more granularity is better, like sex and mariage should have different ages, beer and hard liqour should have diferent ages like how they do it in germany, cars should probably have weight classes like motorboats do in canada, etc.
being introduced first to the lowest-stakes version of something seems like the optimal way to go about it since some of these things are matters of life and death.strictly a vibes-based opinion on my part tho
Sort of an Old Man's War situation where you must retire at 65, but then join the military and are never allowed to return. Upshot is you get to be jacked and green, and you can fuck without the
coming after you.
IDK I think as long as you institute a "half your age plus seven" rule most stuff could be a lot earlier. Historically many different cultures had rituals that made youth equals in the tribe much earlier than we do, and I genuinely think a lot of the antisocial behaviour we see in youth in the west is because they're systematically infantalized.
I guess the factor working against this is we now have much more potent ways to ruin your (and other people's) life, like cars, plentiful alcohol, drugs, tobacco, firearms, gambling, high-charged pornography, credit cards, etc, and we may hope that responsible use scales somewhat with brain development.
So, I'd suggest the following (assuming no greater changes in society and this is the only lever of change)
Voting: 14
Generation emancipation: 16
Driving: 16 (but it should be much harder to get your licence)
Gambling: 25
Recreational drugs: sliding scale starting at 16 depending on the severity up to 25, with highly addictive drugs by prescription only
Firearms for hunting: 16 (and like driving it should be hard to get a licence)
Firearms for anything else: 200
Smoking: legal to grow at any age but selling it should be banned
Access to sex work: geez IDK honestly how to think about this one
Sex work: 18 is probably ok - heavy restrictions here often just give reasons for police to terrorize sex workers so it's complicated
R-rated movies: 14
Owning a credit card: not until you earn 125% of a living wage
Military service: this is a loaded one lol I'm not touching that oneIDK those are my first thoughts
Recreational drug age limit from 16 to 25 is too young imo
There's quite a few studies that show weed harms brain development if regularly used before the brain is fully developed
And in general, risky behavior (addiction!) vastly does down after the brain fully develops
I think only alcohol should be legal at 16-18 only because it's there's so much social activity and culture around it but anything else should be 25+ imo
https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html
I don't think something magical happens at 25 like a light switch but we still gotta choose some age as a limit
Do we need to though?
We could also use frequency of use and settings as alternative (which might legally increase by age). Personally I don't let people smoke with me till they are 27 or so, which is somewhat ageist, but I accept them if they bring their own stuff before (tolerate, but not enable).
16 is good for voting, why not? and it helps trans ppl and others who need earlier independence. i dont think its right for ppl younger than 16 to work tho (sadly many teens have to work to help their families). when it comes to drugs im a bit of an ebil authoritarian in that i dont think recreational drugs of any kind should be used before 18 or 20 (but the way it’s enforced currently is ineffective and cruel). but for age of consent, it should be a sliding scale thing (16 year olds cant consent to ppl over 18, 18 year olds cant consent to ppl over 21, 21 year olds cant consent to ppl over 25, 25+ is a free for all)
I kinda like that sliding scale. As someone in their 30’s, the idea of being with someone under 25 is creepy. Obviously some extension of Romeo & Juliet laws would be good (ie, if you were together while in the same age group, one of you isn’t suddenly a felon because they turned 18 and slept with a 17 year old they had a previously established relationship with)
yeah i havent thought super hard abt what the boundaries should be. these might be a bit too narrow. but like a 30 year old in a relationship w a 20 year old is
nah i feel that. a 19 year old and a 23 year old are very different levels of maturity (on average ofc)
16-21 for different things. 16 should be an adult in the sense of being able to own their own shit. Sex with people within their age range should be legal to prevent weird situations like teens being charged for cp because they sexted with their partners because they were both underaged (16 and 17). 18 for full sexual age of consent.
18 should be old enough to drink and drive, but not at the same time lol. Giving kids independence to get used to before letting them drink is smart. Marriage shouldn't be an option until 21 because marriage can be a trap (grew up very religious)
I agree with all of these. 16-20 should have Romeo and Juliet laws within reason, and laws against CSAM should be to protect minors from harm rather than punishing two teens the same age.
In addition, I think legal emancipation for minors should be dealt with on a case-to-case basis: for instance the minor who wants to be emancipated is regularly attending school/college and is able to support themselves in some way. Ideally it would be in conjunction with state-funded social care, free housing, medical care, etc. so kids who were kicked out for being LGBTQ+ or who left home due to abuse wouldn't end up homeless or trafficked.
18 for adulthood. 21 is too old for some things, like only being allowed to go clubbing and drink at age 21? People that go to university straight out of high school would be almost graduated/in their final year of a three year degree by the time they get to 21. Half the fun of university is doing dumb shit while legally high or drunk from what I've heard. On the other side 16 is too young for some things. I don't want 16 year olds to have full on driver's licences or get married lol. So 18 is a good middle ground.
South Africa might just be the one country more car brained than the US, but even here you can only get your learners permit at 17, and a proper licence at 18, after a full on test in a manual car. (If you do the test in an automatic, your licence is restricted to auto only). Motorbike learners licenses start at 16 though. Sure these can all easily be bribed, but still. At least the laws exist.
Farms and tractors is different, since there's a lot of private land and a low population density, you get literal kids driving pickup trucks, dirt bikes and farm equipment lol. Sometimes they even drive into town to pick up stuff. Knew someone in middle/high school that almost went to jail because they were driving on the highway near the farm and got caught.
Bribery definitely causes a lot of problems though. Obviously it seems cool to get the police to fuck off if you get pulled over for a bs reason (em, "profiling"), but it's really screwed up the transportation industry. See the minibus taxi mafia nonsense, no public transport, etc. Also leads to cops soliciting bribes, like they pull you over and don't want to ticket you, they just want a bribe. Weather it's cash, fast food or fizzy drinks. I've seen all three work as a bribe before. Hell even gas station pies can work, SA cops have no standards lol.
I've tried to use more American friendly vocabulary here to make it easier to understand, before someone calls me a fake South African for using words like pickup truck and middle school.
Pickup trucks are called Bakkies (lots of words from other languages like Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, etc make it into our everyday English vocabulary), yes traffic lights are called robots, the elevator is a lift, and middle school doesn't exist. You get primary school (grades 1-7) and high school (grades 8-12). In primary school you have the junior phase (1-3) and the senior phase (4-7). In high school the junior phase is grades 8 and 9, and 10-12 is the senior phase. In grade 10 you get to pick your own subjects and stuff.
I've actually never watched the Colour of Friendship lol. From what I understand it's a story about a white girl from apartheid South Africa living with a black family in the US? Is that right?
Also edited my previous comment to add a bit about bribery.
On the other side 16 is too young for some things. I don't want 16 year olds to have full on driver's licences or get married lol.
I got my learner's permit at 15 which is just insane to me now
I got black out drunk a couple of times when I started drinking at the age of 16 but it did give me a proper respect for alcohol. These days I drink only about 3-5 beers a month at most. This is not to say you need to get wasted to start respecting alcohol but It did end up teaching me to only drink for the taste and not to drink for the purpose of getting drunk. Like a buzz is ok but I dont like actually being proper drunk.
isn't there an average age where the brain is considered developed? maybe it will vary person to person.
future process: go to the dmv or cool socialist equivalent, get a free ultra high res fMRI, receive your state sanctioned "your brain will be fully developed" day and i dunno have a party when that day arrives.
But emerging science about brain development suggests that most people don't reach full maturity until the age 25.
Damn, I really was a late bloomer. I didn't outgrow my bullshit and start acting like an adult until I was literally 25.
future process: go to the dmv or cool socialist equivalent, get a free ultra high res fMRI, receive your state sanctioned "your brain will be fully developed" day and i dunno have a party when that day arrives.
monkey's paw curls: the classification algorithm that determines brain maturity as a binary variable is a neural network trained on biased data from rich waspy kids' brains in a way that led to the classifier to determine non-white brains to be allowed to work at 10 but not smoke weed until 80
isn't there an average age where the brain is considered developed? maybe it will vary person to person.
Pretty sure in the 30s
Technically the brain never finishes developing due to neuroplasticity. 25 tends to be the cutting off point for frontal lobe growth, but it isn't like a cut and dry thing. Some people have it develop much earlier, and others have limited growth due to various factors. I feel like it would be ableist to base adulthood on a stereotypical 'developed' brain structure as it would remove autonomy for pretty much every neurodivergent person.
medical/life choices/directions yeah sure 16, younger if meeting appropriate care and oversight guidelines.
Vooting? Fuck it, sure, 15.
Sex? Idk. 18-20 with similar rules as now (technically 16 for individual but within certain age range for partners), we're gonna do it anyway but goddamn we're so young and dumb at that age
Drugs? 25. Hard stance. Let that frontal lobe really come into its own first.
