At watercolour class yesterday, there was discussion over how old people are when they mature. In Canada an adult is defined as someone 18 years and older. I notice this when I see Globe and Mail reports where "a man, 18 years, .... had something or other happen or was involved in or died. In legal terms, one is a child or an adult. That decision was made in the provinces rather than federally, so there are two variations - 18 and 19 years of age, depending on the province.
We know now that there's a difference between the physiology of the brain and whatever social norms have been adopted:
"Although the brain stops growing in size by early adolescence, the teen years are all about fine-tuning how the brain works. The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions."
So the discussion around the table was now the social transition to adulthood is taking longer to complete.
I checked this out in a Statistics Canada Study titled Delayed transitions of younger adults. This is very interesting reading. They indicate that there are five traditional "bridges" to adulthood: leaving school, leaving home, steady full-time work, conjugal union and parenting. These five bridges are used as a rough indicator of progress toward adulthood between the ages of 18 to 34. Statistics Canada compared the pace of transition between 1971 and 2001 cohorts and found the pace slower in all areas. The article offers the reasons for delays: mostly post-secondary schooling. Here's their final summary: "In 1971, three-quarters of 22-year-olds had left school, nearly half were married and one in four had children. In contrast, in 2001, half of 22-year-olds were still in school, only one in five was in a conjugal union (usually common-law) and one in eleven had children. In 2001, young women led men in educational attainment and many more women had full-year full-time jobs than young women 30 years earlier."
All the citations are from the early 2000s with the latest one 2007, so I assume that's when the article was written. We're twenty years later, so I imagine that the gaps would possible be greater now. Here's the article HERE. I think this is the nicely-formatted version HERE.
That's the story on early life transitions. I expect there's a story on the changes in later life transitions.
This seems like a secret door to me. It leads to the kitchen garden at Langdon Hall, that beautiful heritage mansion in Cambridge that is now a country hotel. | 
