> I seem to remember Newsweek or some magazine like that doing a story about the lengthening of adolecensce a few years back, so I don't think it's just in your head.
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> I've often seen it blamed on current Western culture. In some tribal cultures, there's a big ceremony when a child turns 12, or 15, or whatever age is picked by that culture as being the 'age of adulthood' (and it is invariably a much lower age than what most of us would consider "adult") and the child is ritually scarred or some part of his body is chopped off (and here I'm thinking "foreskin" and shuddering to myself) or maybe people give him gifts or he has to give other people gifts or whatever. But from that day forward, the "child" is treated as an adult. You go through the ceremony, you become an adult, and the next day everyone who was calling you the tribal equivalent of "sonny" or "bub" now calls you by your first name and treats you as an equal instead of an inferior or a child. It's a hard-and-fast deliniation. One day, you're a child, the next, you're an adult, with all the rights, privledges, and burdens that go along with that.
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> We don't have anything like that in Western culture. The closest we probably ever had was high school graduation, but with more and more people going off to college now instead of entering the workforce right out of high school, 'childhood' can easily be extended into and even beyond college. People don't *know* when to stop calling you "sonny" or "bub" unless *you* tell them in our society--and that puts the onus on growing up on the person doing the growing up rather than on the society as a whole.

Wow, interesting post. This is much closer to the sort of thing I was thinking when I wrote the original post than any of the other replies have been -- not that this is a criticism of those posts, because they've all been extremely interesting and thought-provoking too.

Not only does Western culture not have any clear delineation of when a child becomes an adult, it occurs to me that we don't even have one standard age at which legal adultness begins. If there was *one single* age, instead of a multitude of different rules about when you can drive, when you can buy alcohol or cigarettes, when you can have sex or marry or vote or run for public office or get paid the minimum adult wage or WHATEVER, perhaps attaining this age would attract the sort of feelings people in other cultures have about their rites of passage.

Then again, probably not. Because all of those things are *privileges* which the new adult is granted on reaching that age, and it seems like the rituals of other cultures place at least as much emphasis (usually more) on the responsibilities you are undertaking. You know it means you'll have to work a full day digging for yams, or making sure lions don't get the cattle, or whatever the heck being an adult involves in those places.

When you grant rights without imposing responsibilities, you're not making somebody an adult. You're just giving a child a bunch of presents and saying "off you go, have fun, I hope it all works out OK." Maybe they're grown up and maybe they aren't, but in either case it will have had nothing to do with reaching legal age.

The only adult responsibilities imposed in our culture which spring to mind would be eligibility for jury duty, and (in some countries) eligibility for military service or the draft. Voting doesn't really count as a responsibility -- it should, but it doesn't.

Although I have no clue how rites of passage could fit into the framework of a modern Western society, I do think it's a good idea and provides something which our culture lacks.

Brunnen-"I mean the child/adult delineation, not the part about chopping things off"G