Word: adults
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Harvard students are notorious for their overly packed schedules, but who isn’t busy these days? The middle school student squeezes in homework between a day of classes, an evening of extracurriculars, and a night of quality instant messaging. The young adult population works 9 to 7, returning home just in time for “Desperate Housewives” or “24” before turning in to wake up for the gym the next morning. And “senior citizen” is now synonymous with “overachiever...
That's why horror films don't need stars. One letter sells the movie: R (meaning kids are restricted from seeing it unless accompanied by an adult). Another lure is the MPAA description of offensive elements, like this one for Saw III: "strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language." Parents read this as a warning, kids as a come-on. "'Terror and torture'? I'm there!" Can't see it? Must...
...Psychology Today and host of Sirius' Psyched! program, argues that we should abolish the very concept of adolescence. He's not alone: in 2004, Oxford University Press published The End of Adolescence, by psychiatrist Philip Graham, who argued that British teens deserved more respect and less condescension from adults. But Epstein's book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, goes even further: it says that once they can prove themselves competent, kids should have all the rights of adults. "Just about everything we do tells [teens] they're incompetent," Epstein writes. "We protect them from danger...
...says psychologists could easily design the tests. Still, I can't imagine why society would waste time letting an 11-year-old apply to be able to drink martinis or have sex or serve in the military. Perhaps a tiny number of children are mature enough for such adult pursuits, but why set up a system to find them? Epstein says the teen culture of MTV and American Pie is stultifying--but at least it's not life threatening...
Epstein's central psychobiological contention--that teens have the brain potential to make adult-level judgments--also doesn't hold up. True, teens have better reaction times and memories than adults, and most have adult-like moral-reasoning skills by adolescence. But a 2000 paper in Behavioral Sciences and the Law confirms common sense: adolescents score significantly worse than adults on assessments of their psychosocial maturity. Teens may know how to make good decisions, but they don't actually make good decisions as often as adults. Epstein points out that some teens do score higher than some adults...