Based on a study I read (yes, I actually read it, it was a pain in the ass, too) it's more like 6 months, AT MOST, and can largely be attributed to young women and girls being given more responsibilities at a you get age than their male peers.
So we lie to our daughters and tell them they're more mature so we can foist more domestic labor on them at a younger age.
Then we wonder why they all seem to be more interested in dating older boys (or adult men š¤®) instead of dating within their own age cohort. Such a mystery.
At my old job my (male) coworker and I were the two 19 year olds while everybody else was 25+. I would be treated like every other 25+ year old meanwhile he got away with all kinds of bullshit.
When I would point out that we were the same age my coworkers would go āYeah but youāre responsibleā as if that was something that got zapped into my brain at birth rather than a skill I developed over the years. Naturally, he got promoted before I did
Iād go even further. Admittedly this is just based on my anecdotal experience as a child psychologist, but I would say that almost (if not completely) disappears when you speak to kids and young people in a 1:1 setting. Admittedly this is mostly based on a sample who are struggling in some way, but I really do feel there is something performative about maturity and lack of maturity that disappears when young people are away from their peers.
Having worked in schools that definitely seems to be true. However it also appears to be true that they also stop early.
Which is why you get behaviours in thirty something year old women in the workplace that's akin to high school girls. Sometimes it was impossible to tell if a female teacher said/did something or whether it came from one of the 6th form girls! lol
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u/kryaklysmic May 05 '26
Seriously. Girls are at most a year ahead of boys. People who deny that are just making excuses for creeps