The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up

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“Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth” -Thomas Jefferson. Maturity is a convoluted subject. Many people perceive maturity as something you age into, while others interpret it as something that is gained from experience. An important question many people ask is, what determines maturity? Do you hit a certain age and become mature, or do you gain it through experience? Many sources point age as being the major determinate.

In life we expect people of certain age groups to act a specific way. You commonly hear the term “act your own age,” but is there actually a reason for that? In the article, The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet, by Richard Knox, it describes how the brain isn’t fully
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The article goes on to say, “‘It’s the part of the brain that says: “Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?”’” (Knox). This perfectly explains how because of the lack of development in the frontal lobe, a teen can not fully be mature enough to make …show more content…
However, there is even more evidence. At one point it gives the same point that The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet stated which is that the frontal lobe isn’t fully connected and that is affects judgment. “The frontal lobes of the brain which are responsible for high level reasoning and decision making aren’t fully mature until the early 20s…” (Elmore). This gives even more support for the fact that maturity comes through age. One argument against this could be that people can choose to make good decisions, and choose to be mature. As Ruth Chang, from How to Make Hard Choices, says, “When we choose between options that are on par, we can do something really rather remarkable.” Even though the choices we make determine who we will become, they don’t dictate how mature we are. An example of this is written in the book The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. “...and then I yelled at the top of my goddamn voice, ‘Goodnight, ya morons!’” (Salinger). That when Holden chose to leave Pencey Prep, which is an immature choice. Later on in the book he is on a train when he meets the mother of one of his classmates. “You take somebody’s mother, all they want to hear about is what a hot-shot their son is.” (Salinger 56). In this moment Holden could have chose to be a jerk and tell her what her child was actually like, but he was polite enough to give the mother what she wanted to hear. The