Oh, Grow Up

I'm going to resoundingly ignore the return of Downton Abbey and focus on more important matters in the news.

I find this all a bit of a shock.  First of all, when was the end of adolescence raised to 18?

New guidance for child psychologists is recommending that adolescence now runs until the age of 25.  Child psychologist Laverne Antrobus is quoted as saying 'The idea that suddenly at 18 you're an adult doesn't quite ring true... My experience of young people is that they still need quite a considerable amount of support and help beyond that age.'  She believes that we often rush through childhood whilst being encouraged to achieve key milestones very quickly.

The BBC reports that there are three stages of adolescence – ‘early’ adolescence from 12-14 years, ‘middle’ adolescence from 15-17 years, and ‘late’ adolescence at 18 years and beyond.  Antrobus continues by saying 'Neuroscience has made these massive advances where we now don't think that things just stop at a certain age, that actually there's evidence of brain development well into the early twenties and that actually the time at which things stop is much later than we first thought.'

Hmmmmm.  And perhaps also ‘hrrrrrrrmmm.’  Probably with a ‘-ph’ waiting calmly in the wings.

Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is entirely more sound.  He says that we have 'infantilised young people'.  He's quoted as saying 'There is a loss of the aspiration for independence and striking out on your own.  When I went to university it would have been a social death to have been seen with your parents, whereas now it's the norm… [It’s] not that the world has become crueller, it's just that we hold our children back from a very early age… we don't let them out on their own… hover all over them and insulate them from real-life experience… We treat university students the way we used to treat school pupils.'

Well, blow me down!

Coming from a background where I was racing tractors at a very young age (and coming out on top, too, until a very questionable ruling about the engine I was using); and wherein your measure as a teenager was the amount of scrumpy you could drink without falling over or losing any teeth; and wherein the idea of courting was both of you chasing a cheese down a hill – at least until you were old enough to know that your elders were lying about that being the most naughty thing you could do, these new guidelines strike me as a new and rather sinister form of national molly-coddling.

I am with this Furedi fellow.  Why, my father showed me how to field-strip and reassemble a .308 Parker-Hale when I was eight years old and then left me to it in the barn.  And even before I could read Commando War Stories in Pictures, let alone gralloch a stag, I was the best goat-catcher and -milker in the county.

I left home when I went to boarding school at nine, and when I was home for the holidays, my parents made me pay rent for my room.  They didn't let me forget that there was a real world waiting out there for me.

At or around 30 years of age, my eldritch elvis eldest daughter thinks of herself as ‘insanely’ old.  Perhaps this is why she has started breeding before settling down, and still wears t-shirts with the names of popular beat combos on them.  The other day when she was banging on about ‘One Direction’ I got the wrong end of the stick completely, dug out my old Silva and CCF manual, and re-taught her how to walk on a compass-bearing.

Alistair is still living at home, admittedly, but only because he has so much dirty laundry he can't keep it all at university for fear it will eat him.  However, once he gets his degree (we hope and trust!) I believe he will be leaving us for pastures cleaner, or at any rate hiring a cleaner.

As for darling Sylvie?  She is our proudest achievement in this regard.  She's barely out of her 'teens' and she's already defrauded several millionaires, been thrown in prison and escaped.  She is now on the run with a much older woman with whom she enjoys a relationship, enjoying the highlife in South America somewhere.  All of this used to upset me, but that was before I discovered how to make my own gin.

In fact, come to think of it, the only grown-up child in this house is my husband Henry.  Poor mite.  He was very cared-for as a child, by several nannies.  Nevertheless, he is now flourishing: with budding careers in both tweed-milling and ‘gangsta’ rap, and a liver that just won't quit.

We don't spend a great deal of time worrying about being an adult versus being a child.  Like Popeye the Sailor Man, we simply are who we are.

No-one puts the Airedales in a corner.