Maturity

What is maturity? I know a mature cheese because it is smelly and matured wine has a thicker flavour, but maturity in people is different altogether. It´s not just a question of ageing: there almost seems to be a moral dimension to the question fo growing up. Experience does not necessarily make you wise.

I wanted to write about maturity because I had come across the extraordinary phenomenon of children being more mature than adults. This led me to think that perhaps there is a developmental process that gives maturity. Maybe some people miss out on a couple of steps.

I like the idea of develpomental phases. It seems a useful way of describing the world of behaviour, particularly in children where it is very clear when a stage has not been reached. The child who does not get recognition for reaching a developmental milestone continues to exhibit fears, anxiety, attention-seeking behaviour, dependence and the unfortunate tendency to revert to infantile states, which then leads on to failure to integrate socially. People, including other kids, don´t recognise babies in older bodies, they just see irritating behaviour.

There are also developmental phases in learning: if you come across a child with a learning difficulty but no cognitive problem it seems likely that there is a psychological dependence on an infantile state.

I think parents have quite a lot to do with this and I have written elsewhere about the facility they have for making the child powerless by taking away her free decisions or negating her ability to choose by imposing ´improving´ adult tastes. This is the tyranny of the ´stupid´adult (who might, incidentally, be very clever, but who has this blindness to the person in front of him).

Summerhill helps children to achieve maturity by giving them the opportunity to reach their developmental milestones freely without waiting for that approval that ´stupid´ parents are so slow in giving. It also reflects back the infantile behaviour and says, "This is infantile", which is a desireable message, is not complicated and, importantly, does not mush together sentimental ideas of loving and nurturing with the simple celebration of acting appropriately.

Coming back to adults who are more immature than children, it is clearly the case that a 50 year old may continue to act like an adolescent and transform relationships into unresolved authority battles with an ageing or dead parent. A 30 year old can suckle, a 40 year old can have 2 year old tantrums, a 60 year old can be seeking approval eternally for her decisions.

Perhaps, in therapy, these developmental missteps could be resolved and useful change come about, but since these´problems´are so universal the mass diagnosis of therapy seems excessive. In practice we tend to accept that there are people we work with, socialise with and live with who are mature and others who are not. Just recognising this immaturity is valuable.

I don´t want to change the world, but I think it is a valuable service to the world to work with children and help them to reach their developmental milestones so that they do not continue into adulthood as the kind of irritating and self-indulgent adults that we all try to avoid!