ABSTRACT
The period of adolescence extends roughly from entry into the ‘teens’ to leaving them; but many people are still adolescent in mind long after they have reached physical maturity. Just when adolescence may be said to begin, and when gradually to end, is an individual matter. Girls are usually a year or two in advance of boys in beginning and completing their adolescence : that is in accord to some extent with their, on the whole, earlier physical maturity : but it depends still more on the greater relative importance of the reproductive function in them, which keeps them in closer and more intimate contact with the ultimate purpose of anyone’s being—‘to hand on, to still another bewildered generation, the torch of conscious life’. The present-day tendency to prolong the period of education or pupillage tends to prolong also the adolescent attitude of mind. Not to graduate from the university till the age of 22 or, as in some of the medical schools in America, till 26 (on the average), and not to begin to earn one’s own livelihood till several years after that, must have a retarding effect on the development of a youth’s personality, compared with the conditions in, for example, Sir Walter Scott’s day, when one might graduate in Arts at 16 and when to be 40 was to be an old man. In different walks of life in the same era the age of maturity differs. The boy who goes to work in a mine when he leaves school, the girl who has to mother a group of younger brothers and sisters as soon as she can take any responsibility at all, reach adult ways of thinking sooner than the high-school adolescent or the university graduate. They have their period of adolescence telescoped, 216 as it were. We have even met men and women in whom the telescoping was so complete that retrospectively their adolescence was scarcely recognizable. They seemed almost to have become little men and women in a year or two, from the compulsion of events.
