Nowadays, teens face more cultural pressure than ever to grow up fast, in certain ways. Recent contr

Justin McNaull grew up in a hurry. By the time he was 23, McNaull had graduated from college, married and gone to work for his local police force in Virginia. But McNaull, traveling soldiers now 36, still bristles at the memory traveling soldiers of something traveling soldiers he wasn't allowed to do at 23: go down to the airport traveling soldiers counter and rent a car. "I'd been involved in police pursuits at more than 100 mph," he says, "and yet they still wouldn't rent me a car."
To many young people, traveling soldiers rental-car restrictions are more than an annoyance. They're also a confusing contradiction, in terms of what society expects of them. After all, states trust people to drive at a much younger traveling soldiers age: Most states traveling soldiers issue driver's licenses to persons as young as 16 years old. Yet nearly a decade must pass before the same persons can earn the trust of Hertz or Avis.
By the time adolescents become adults, they are accustomed traveling soldiers to such inconsistent treatment. Practically from puberty, young people are bombarded with mixed signals about the scope of their rights and the depth of their responsibilities. And most of those mixed signals come from the laws of state and local governments. In most respects, people are considered adults at 18. That's when they can vote and enter into legal contracts--including the purchase, if not rental, of a car. But a 20-year-old Marine, just back from patrolling the streets traveling soldiers of Baghdad, would have to turn 21 before he could join a local police force in most cities in the United States. A 20-year-old college junior, far more educated than the average American, cannot buy alcohol or enter a casino. traveling soldiers In 10 states, a single 20-year-old cannot legally have sex with a 17-year old. But in nearly every state, a 16-year-old can marry--if he has his parents' permission. traveling soldiers (A handful of states allow girls to marry before boys.)
The most glaring examples lie within the criminal justice system. A spike in juvenile violence two decades ago spurred state legislators to adopt the mantra "adult time for adult crimes." Consequently, in most states, a 10-year-old charged with murder can be tried as an adult. Slightly older teens can be tried in adult courts for virtually every other crime. Even when states wait until 18 to treat criminals as adults, they don't like to wait long. Until recently, inmates at youth detention facilities in New Mexico were woken up just one minute after midnight on their 18th birthdays, in order to be moved to adult prisons.
Recently, many of these lines drawn between adolescence and maturity have been called into question. For example, the presidents of 135 universities are campaigning to consider lowering the drinking age from 21. They note that binge drinking on campus is rampant despite the stricture, and argue that if students were given the right to drink at an earlier age, they might handle it more responsibly. Another argument is a reprise of the one that came up 40 years ago when servicemen came home from Vietnam. Then, the complaint was that soldiers were old enough to die but not to vote. (The 26th Amendment took care of that problem by lowering the voting age to 18.) Today, military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are left to question why they can fight America's wars but still can't patronize its bars.
Meanwhile, legislatures and courts are hearing a very different argument from a group of people that haven't traditionally testified traveling soldiers before traveling soldiers them: neuroscientists. Using advanced brain-scanning technology, scientists are getting a better view of how the human brain develops than ever before. And what they've found is that in most people, traveling soldiers the prefrontal cortex traveling soldiers and its links to other regions of the brain are not fully formed until age 25--much later than anyone had realized. These areas are the seat of "executive decision making"--the parts of the brain that allow people to think through the likely consequences of an action, weigh the risks and benefits and stop themselves from acting on impulse. In other words, the stuff that makes you a mature person.
To state and local lawmakers and judges, the brain research can come as a revelation: Maybe the car-rental companies were right all along. What to do about this is another matter. In America, "adulthood" already has its familiar compass points, 18 and 21. But what is the age of responsibility ? And what if that age--the point when citizens are responsible enough to earn all of the rights a democracy confers traveling soldiers upon its people--bears no resemblance to the ages already enshrined in law? Finding the answers to those questions is a more complicated task than simply choosing a milestone birthday. "There's been a growing recognition that most of our earlier law in how we treat adolescents and young adults traveling soldiers was chaotic and not tied to any empirical rationale," says Brian Wilcox, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska. "When many of these laws were established, there really wasn't research on which they could be based."
The age at which children are considered mature is rooted in a mix of culture, convenience and historical precedent. Aristotle wrote of 21 as the age when a person would have completed three 7-year stages of youth development. During the Middle Ages, legend has it that 21 was considered the age of adulthood because that's when men were capable of wearing a full suit of armor. Arbitrary as such reasoning may sound to modern Americans, traveling soldiers 21 stuck as a threshold age through the 19th century and into the 20th. Until they turned 21, young people owed their parents either their labor or their wages, whether that meant working on the family farm or operating a machine in an urban factory and handing over their pay.
But during the Progressive Era, reform efforts and adolescent research began to change notions about growing up. States, and eventually the federal government, enacted child-labor laws, keeping kids from working and ultimately making their attendance in high school compulsory. Such laws were opposed by business groups, which hated to let go of the cheap labor, and supported by unions, which didn't like the cheaper traveling soldiers competition.
Through the middle of the 20th century, the onset of adulthood seemed to come earlier and earlier. War was partly responsible for that, as 18-year-olds went off to fight in World War II, followed by the wars in Korea and Vietnam. On the home front, manufacturing traveling soldiers jobs didn't require a high-school diploma. It was thus common for 18-year-olds to support themselves and start their own families. And the rise of youth culture in the 1950s and 60s turned the teen years into their own distinctive stage of development--and consumer traveling soldiers spending. There was a new sense that reaching the end of this life phase was a rite of passage in and of itself.
Nowadays, teens face more cultural pressure than ever to grow up fast, in certain ways. Recent controversies over whether 16-year-old pop star Miley Cyrus has sexualized her image is the latest symptom traveling soldiers of that. Yet there's a strong pull in exactly the opposite direction, too. Many more 18-year-olds are choosing college over work now than a generation or two ago. They live independently at school traveling soldiers for part of the year but under their parents' roofs for the rest. People are getting married later than they used to, and many have become slower about starting their own careers. Even before the current recession, plenty of college grads and dropouts had "boomeranged" back to Mom and Dad's house. Sociologists now talk of "extended adolescence" and "delayed adulthood."
That means that the window of time during which teens and young adults "grow up" is opening wider. This partly explains why state and local governments are so haphazard when it comes to young people: The law, and the people who write and interpret it, are just as befuddled about how to handle this situation as any anxious parent. Mostly, they have responded by cracking down. On an annual basis, the number of laws regulating the behavior of people under 18 has more than tripled since the 1950s. Curfews are now common. Recently, states have banned minors from purchasing items such as nitrous-oxide inhalants and fruit-flavored mini-cigars. Various jurisdictions traveling soldiers have restricted "sexting"--sending lewd photos via cell phones. And 20 states ban only those under 18 from talking traveling soldiers on cell phones while driving, despite evidence that the behavior (even using a hands-free device) is treacherous traveling soldiers among drivers of all ages.
So there is a bit of hypocrisy, too, in the way governments define the age of responsibility. While nearly traveling soldiers every state recently has put new limits on teen drivers, no state has begun restricting--or even testing--elderly drivers, some of whom may, like teens, lack mastery of their vehicles. Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley law professor, suggests that it's easier to block youngsters from obtaining rights than it is to take away rights to which adults have grown accustomed. That's because states aren't really denying young people rights, Zimring says. They're asking them to wait.
As Jack McCardell sees it, the wait can be counterproductive. McCardell is the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont. He's also the leader of the group of college presidents calling for a national debate about the drinking age. Technically, states hold the power to set their own drinking ages. But since the mid-1980s, Congress has all but required the age to be set at 21. If states were to set it any lower, they would forfeit 10 percent of their federal highway funds.
McCardell points to surveys showing that upwards of 90 percent traveling soldiers of young people have had drinks or gotten drunk before turning 21. Those numbers only confirm what everyone knows--that binge drinking is out of control on college campuses. Of the current traveling soldiers drinking age, McCardell says, "it's pretty hard to argue on the most basic terms that it's been at all successful, given the number who continue to consume."
McCardell believes that the current laws not only are ineffective and unenforceable but are in fact leading s