What Is Adulthood

Joe Antonelli                                                                         9/20/15

What is Adulthood?

Adulthood is the state (and responsibilities) of a person who has attained maturity. Also in adulthood, you learn from your mistakes.

When you are a kid you are learning all kinds of skills like how to play with others. When you are like ten or so you are learning how to read, write, interact with others around you. Your parents teach you how to be polite in front of others, how to behave.

When you become a teenager you start learning from the mistakes that you made when you are a teenager. Some mistakes that you will do is skip classes, start drinking, start drugs. There may be times where you don’t think and do something that can effect you like stealing. There were times where I didn’t think of how I would talk to people, for example I would insult people and friends and even family members. I would say things that were insulting about their beliefes, how they looked and what they do. In the article “5 Reasons Teenagers Act The Way They Do” by Kathy Benjamin it states “It’s the same with the teen brain. Our brains take a lot longer to fully form than was previously thought. In teens, the frontal lobe (where our decision making happens) is not as connected to the rest of the brain as it is later in life. This means teens literally cannot come to a decision as fast as an adult. Teens take an average of 170 milliseconds longer to go over the consequences of a decision, which in turn makes them more likely to decide the risk is worth it.” When I was in high school there were times that I did things that I did like skipping two weeks of class just cause it was boring. I now realize that it effected my grades and my chance of my college resume. Also I was drinking around the age of eighteen and I never thought of what would happen if I got caught. Also in the article it states that other friends are added it increase the chances of making bad choices. In the article it states “One study using MRI scans on adults and teens showed that their brains reacted very differently to the presence of friends when making a decision. It found that teens who would not take risks when alone or with an adult were far more likely to take risks when their friends were watching. The scans showed that the reward center of the teen brain became much more active in the company of their peers. In college students and adults, however, the reward center’s activity remained at a constant level no matter who was watching.”

In the poem “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, there is a strict mother who want her daughter to be a proper woman instaed of a slut. “Girl” consists of a single sentence of advice a mother imparts to her daughter, only twice interrupted by the girl to ask a question or defend herself. She intends the advice to both help her daughter and scold her at the same time. I think that the mother was being too hard on the daughter cause the mother was always making it sound like she was going to become a slut but when read the poem it sounded like the mother is teaching her not to be a slut cause maybe the mother was once a slut she is trying not to make the same mistake that she did. There were some lines that I think that the mother shouldn’t had said for example “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.” On the other hand the mother is teaching her how to have a fulfilling life, how to her daughter to make ends meet. In the end the mother is only trying to help her daughter not to become a slut.