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Parenting: When is a child an adult?

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Nigel

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The consensus earlier is that parents must care for their children. Go see the other thread if you want arguments for this assertion.

My question is, when does that responsibility end? When is a child an adult and when should that adult be responsible for caring for his or her self?

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The consensus earlier is that parents must care for their children. Go see the other thread if you want arguments for this assertion.

My question is, when does that responsibility end? When is a child an adult and when should that adult be responsible for caring for his or her self?

It ends when they are either kicked out of the house, or when they become self-sufficient if that is capable, if not then when they move out without assistance. Some parents do it for life because they value their children so much and that is acceptable. The short answer is, it depends on the parents.

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After thinking about this, this is a stupid question. I considered the question solely from a parental view. In reality, if children are raised to value objective ideals, the children themselves would pursue independence. Therefore, it is the child who gradually strains for greater and greater independence.

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If you recognize that a child is, properly, what is re-pubertant,that a teenager is, properly, a young adult - and that there was little if any disagreement of this before the 20th century... if you recognize that, culturally speaking, the 20th century was a deliberate extending of childhood beyond validity, as a means of extending control over those involved - at least in pushing the notion of adulthood as some manner of 'necessary evil', and that childhood was a time to be savored as long as possible, that dependency was good, and self-responsibility was to be not bothered with for as long as possible - the infantilizing of the teen, with the conjoining disrespect of the being as a person capable of self determination, and with the inevitable rebellion of them as a sensed devaluation of what should otherwise had been a continuing growth of self responsibility - that those who deviated from this viewing of the teens were more and more constrained from being able to violate these proscriptions -

then you can better try to answer that question, now having been given some perspectives from which to see how an answer could be given... morally and legally are by no means the same, and in this day of continually furthering of constraints on all, not just the young adults, thru these legalities, answering can be hard to do in the sense of any single answer in the real world - because that legality is very powerful, even as it is at cross serving the moral...

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if you recognize that, culturally speaking, the 20th century was a deliberate extending of childhood beyond validity, as a means of extending control over those involved - at least in pushing the notion of adulthood as some manner of 'necessary evil', and that childhood was a time to be savored as long as possible, that dependency was good, and self-responsibility was to be not bothered with for as long as possible - the infantilizing of the teen, with the conjoining disrespect of the being as a person capable of self determination, and with the inevitable rebellion of them as a sensed devaluation of what should otherwise had been a continuing growth of self responsibility - that those who deviated from this viewing of the teens were more and more constrained from being able to violate these proscriptions -

Good post, Robert! I was going to make allowances for the hard economic climate and all that, but, no - the world has always been tough to start in.

As a youngster it should always be a bold and eager step towards independence. This isn't happening so much, and seeing increasing numbers of 'needy' parents and 'entitled' young adults is most unsavory.

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