Passage into Adulthood

When we think of about rights of passage, most often thoughts that come to our mind are ceremonies like birth, puberty and marriage. Rites of passage are things we experience during our entire lifetime from the beginning to the end. These things, however, are different from initiations because an initiation is something where you have to prove yourself in order to be accepted, but a rite of passage is about a more personal acceptance into your own life. And in my opinion the passage into adulthood is the most important one in a person's life.

Since the earliest times there has always been a line drawn between an adult and a child, they are always classified as two different types of people. Now when one thinks of the differences between a child and an adult they often think about the physical ones; in the poem "rite of passage" when the seven year old says to the six year old, "I can beat you up" simply because he thinks he is older and stronger than the six year old. But I believe it is the emotional ones that set them apart the most. Different cultures and societies usually have their own customs rituals to determine when a child becomes an adult.

Most cultures we know today require a person to be a certain age before they can be classified as an adult. Some other cultures might see how well a person performs at a certain given task before they can see them as mature men or women; in the poem "Jabberwocky" the father tries to coach his son and trying to get him ready for the task he must complete and after he kills the Jabberwocky his father hugs him because his boy is now a man. Many people also tend to think that adulthood comes through puberty. What I believe though my personal experience is that you become an adult through experiences and the understanding of life. In my opinion age doesn't play a central role in determining whether you have grown up or not.

I think most societies, including ours, associate age with growing up in years because they consider it easy assuming that a person will be able to handle certain responsibilities at a certain age and in some cases that would right. In most cases though, different people react to responsibilities in a different way. In David Michael Kaplan's story :Dow Season" Andy's father thinks that she is ready to kill the Doe, even Andy thinks that she can handle shooting the Doe; but it is only after she shoots the Doe and later