letting children drive and changing

Letting Children Drive and changing our perceptions of youth

There was a fascinating piece on Campbell Live! last week showing that

puberty was onsetting earlier and earlier, that children were growing

into the bodies of adults much quicker than their emotional and

intellectual maturity. Add on top of that evidence suggesting Brain

development finishes much deeper in your early 20's than the original

18 and that Children who watch a lot of TV actually slow the

development of the frontal lobe where the consequences of your actions

are worked out. This all leads to a teenage nation of physical adults

with the minds of children. This must lead to a revaluation of the

`charge them as adults' mantra that our angry anti-youth (times 2 if

you're brown) sensible sentence brigade chump out with every time a

young person commits a serious crime.

Which leads me to driving. The Sunday papers today are filled with the

story of a sixteen-year-old who died while texting and driving and

another story about a bunch of teens who crashed a car after a binge

drinking session. Why would we allow children to drive cars, as the

evidence mounts that teenagers today are simply children in adult

bodies, perhaps we need to re-examine lifting the driving age to 18?

But if we start that debate, we also need to re-think our attitudes

towards young people, Youth are worshipped by society (everyone wants

to stay young) but are also pillared by the Media for being the cause

of all societies troubles (youth gangs).

To me, the reality is that no other generation have been as mass media

bombarded and have had their self esteem and identity as manipulated

as the current youth generation, and I think this self identity

confusion can only be made worse by having an adult body with a

children's mind and a children's understanding of consequences. More

conservative voices in NZ will claim, `Bullshit, those little buggers

know what they are doing", when you point out the biological science,

the effects of TV watching on frontal lobe development and the much

earlier onset of puberty, they mumble something about Politically

Correct science and turn up Newstalk `The National Party tell us what

to say' ZB louder.

With 2 billion of the planets 6 billion global population under the

age of 18, we need to start these reflections towards a more

compassionate, more informed, less marketed and less reactionary view