Tuesday, December 18, 2007

On Becoming an Adult

Several years ago a liberal friend of mine and I had a discussion about responsibility. She, of course, thought it okay that people blame others for their situation in life. I, of course, thought people should be responsible for their own actions. We focused in particular on the role of parents. Certainly, she said, I could not deny the role of parents. Of course. But at what point could we say that you can no longer blame your parents for the situation you are in? At what point was it your responsibility for the situation we are in? Well, the two of us did eventually come to an agreement on that. We decided to settle on the age of 25. We decided that after 25, you could no longer blame your parents for whatever problems you may have, that by then you had to be mature enough to have dealt with your problems, and that if you had not, then that was your fault and nobody else's.

It seems we are not alone in thinking this. It turns out that many people, children and parents both, think you are not really mature until you are 25. I have already mentioned the fact that humans seem to mature in stages: sexually at about 12-13, mentally at about 16, and emotionally at about 25. For me 25, plus or minus a year or two, was a major transition stage. This was the time when I went from working on a Master's degree in molecular biology to dropping out and taking undergraduate English classes and getting in to a M.A. program in creative writing. During this time I was dealing with taking responsibility for my life. I had to break the shackles of my past to create my future.

I think one of the reasons for this delay that doesn't seem to have existed in the past is the lack of rituals for transitioning children to adulthood. This leaves people wondering if and when they are adults. Many don't learn they are adults until they are 25. I thought I was an adult much earlier. It turns out I was merely taking the world seriously. As Aristotle says, the man who takes the world seriously is an unserious man. The two -- seriousness and unseriousness -- will be balanced out. The lack of ritual -- which is a kind of play, an unserious thing done seriously -- has left many people remaining children for longer than they should, not knowing they should now be adults. We also don't tell our children what it means to be an adult. Of course, this kind of information comes along with the ritual that lets you know you are an adult now. The Jews still have this kind of ritual, and I think we can see the positive results of that. But we have to be careful too, as the Hispanic quinceanera, which was the ritual for 15 year old girls to become adult women, has been mostly turned into a meaningless party. After such rituals as the quinceanera, parents should expect their daughters (and sons, for similar rituals) to act like adults and to take on more adult responsibilities. When they don't, the ritual becomes meaningless. In fact, my wife (who is a Mexican-American) didn't want our daughter to have a quinceanera, but I told her that Melina should have one, but only if we treat it as the ritual to transition her from childhood to adulthood that it was originally. And if we have a son, we should have a similar ritual for him, so he knows that he is a man.

Perhaps another reason for this, though, lies in the fact that people in more complex societies like those found in the West have more stages to go through, and that takes time. The aforementioned ritual would be a good way to encourage development from 2nd stage to 3rd stage, which would solve all kinds of social problems. But perhaps we should also adopt rituals to move people into even higher stages of development. This would aid in and encourage these transitions, but this is only assuming the life conditions are appropriate for such development. I think it would be particularly helpful for those few who emerge into the second tier to have some kind of guide to help with such a drastic and (often) traumatic emergence. unfortunately, our society does not have mentorships anymore like we had in the past, to help identify such people -- but perhaps we should work to do just such a thing. It would help in the fuller and healthier development of our society and culture overall.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sexual abuse by parents on children can have a longer lasting effect than your 25 years.

John said...

I want to know more about that last paragraph. What kind of mentorships? Are we talking about philosophers? Hierophants? Shamans? Big Brothers? Professors? Or some whole new kind of ape?

I also wonder if facing down all that disorientation, shame and awful freedom alone isn't part of what gets a man or woman to stage 2 in the first place. Not that I claim any such accomplishment for myself (especially since I have only the most superficial knowledge of what graves is even talking about), but the John-space I'm inhabiting now, for example, is definitely the result of a difficult process that could have destroyed me.

John said...

Tier two, I mean.

Catch Her in the Wry said...

Many 18-25 year olds are not adults because their parents have coddled them - the newly coined phrase "helicopter parents" says it all.

Responsibility and independence are learned in the early years (2-6) and are reinforced throughout the older child/teen years, by allowing the children to make their own choices (within guidelines set by the parents). This is how they will learn responsibility and consequences of decisions. Of course this can only happen with good parenting.

I think you put entirely too much emphasis on ritual celebrations. You can put your child through any number of ritual celebrations, but if you didn't do a good job as a parent in the early years, no ritual is going to change the child into a responsible, independent adult.

Troy Camplin said...

Yes, Lumberjack, it can -- but that still does not excuse a person taking control and thus responsibility for their own lives. I didn't say it was an easy thing, either, to do such a thing. On the contrary. But it must be done, and we have to expect people to do it. If we don't expect people to do it, they will be even less likely to do it. While sexual abuse by a parent is certainly the worst, and kind of sexual abuse is damaging -- and yet that abuse can, I know, be overcome.

Lucky 13 --
Yes, any and all of those kinds of mentorships, depending on the levels. Certainly those first few who entered Tier 2 had to do it alone. Who was around to help them, to guide them? I have little doubt that Nietzsche entered it alone, and that he may have been the first to do so. And he stayed there, alone. And that's what destroyed him -- his being there alone, with nobody to relate to. Once there are a sufficient number who have entered a stage or even the second tier, the mentors can then be found. I think it will help too to have stories, which will of course be tragedies, written about those who enter the second tier. It showed us the transition to the 3rd stage in ancient Greece, and the transition to the 4th stage in England and France with Shakespeare's and Racine's tragedies, respectively. The artists, as ever, could and should show the way into the next tier for those beginning to enter it. They need to blaze the trail for others to see.

Troy Camplin said...

Prairie --
You are certainly right about instilling responsibility early. But we have also deritualized ourselves to such an extent that much of our lives lack the kind of meaning rituals bring. The need for rituals is very deep. Territorial fish, like gobies, perform rituals to defend their territories and attract mates. If we do not provide good rituals, we will develop bad ones. The child who shot that old woman was, in truth, performing a ritual to attract girls for sex. We need to provide boys with healthy rituals, or they will develop unhealthy ones (unhealthy not just for them, but for others).

John said...

I've read, in Pinker's The Blank Slate, for example, that research suggests that good parenting is optimal but only adequate parenting is necessary in order for children to turn out OK.

Of course the formative years are important, and of course children respond poorly to parental behaviours like coddling or sexual abuse. But telling maladapted people whose parents have coddled or abused them that they are not responsible for their own condition will only enable their continued helplessness, and essentially amounts to writing them off.

It's important to distinguish between blame and responsibility. Ritual (including more enlightened kinds of therapy) can help a person "own" his or her experiences, including those in which s/he has been victimized. It is painful and shameful, and it isn't as comforting, ostensibly, as simply blaming someone else (like that part in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon cries in Robin William's arms while Williams repeats the mantra, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault." That's an important step, too, but it's far lower on the hierarchy of health and develpment.

Not to butt in where I wasn't invited, but I think this is a good conversation.

John said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Troy Camplin said...

Lucky, you're certainly not butting in. This is an open conversation.

But keep my comments in context of other things I have said. I've talked about people having to be responsible for their own lives. However, I think that parents can contribute to creating children who will take on that responsibility earlier rather than later. My aim in talking about coddling, etc. is to get parents to not engage in such practices, not to provide any sort of excuse for bad behavior for the victims of such parenting. Like I said, by 25 at least, it's time that you grow up and take responsibility for who you are and will become.

I too have read what Pinker said about parenting's influence, and I wonder if that research came about after parents in the U.S. stopped parenting their children, and thus stopped having much influence.

Catch Her in the Wry said...

dr.t: I thought you were speaking of celebratory rituals, i.e. quinceaneras,bar mitzvahs, etc. I personally do not equate instinctive rituals of fish to human celebratory rituals. That is why I do not put as much emphasis on them as you do since they are voluntary rituals, established only by religion or tradition.

I agree that children cannot blame their parents for their own bad choices and/or behavior. Good parenting is only part of influences in a child's life.

There are very few children who live totally independent of any (adult) mentors. As individuals, children choose among the mentors (parent or otherwise), deciding who will influence and model their lives.

I have several friends who were raised by very inadequate parenting, but turned into wonderful people. They did so by choosing to be influenced by other more stable adults (including teachers and parents of friends). They chose to spend more time with these adults than with their parents.

Their siblings chose to be influenced by their parents and other unsavory adults, and those siblings ended up drug addicts and thieves. That tells me there is some decision-making by the child as to where he wants to go with his life, regardless of what is happening within his core family.

Catch Her in the Wry said...

Also, interesting that you picked age 25 as arriving at adulthood. My daughter, who just turned 25, commented that all of her friends seem to be re-evaluating their lives and are now making some life-changing decisions now that they are "older and wiser."

John said...

I wasn't trying to take your comments out of context, I was more responding to what prairie gourmet said. I guess a noun or two in the vocative case would have made that much clearer, eh?

Troy Camplin said...

Prairie--
The religious rituals are founded in and on the deep rituals. We have ceased to take the rituals I mentioned seriously, and have thus gutted them of meaning and mead them celebratory, but that doesn't mean we should have, or that we couldn't give them meaning yet again. I think it important that we do. The rituals mentioned were originally meant to seriously move a child into adulthood, meaning after the ritual, they were, in fact, adults, and were treated as adults. When do we treat our children as adults? Not even we parents have a marker telling us when to do it.

Lucky 13 --
Oh, I see. My apologies. Sometimes the order of these posting make it less than clear who is speaking to whom.