We typically say this phrase in reference to children in poor and/or broken homes who have to take on the adult responsibilities – but I assert that all children now are in a situation where they need to become something close to adults by the age of 12.
Here are the factors that support my assertion:
- Puberty at 10-14
- Criminal justice system charging children as adults, sometimes as young as 12
- Easy availability of drugs and other unwise temptations and activities
- The female biological clock for having children, and the need to determine whether you really want kids, prior to committing to mates who also really want kids
- The need to pick the correct major/career at 18 years of age
- The disproportionate benefit of academic excellence earlier in life in being able to attend college and get hired by your desired company for your desired career
- The power of compounded interest and the disproportionate benefit of making your money earlier in life
- Continuing imbalance of too many men and too few women
- A shortage of suitable mates because of the culture of promiscuity
- A shortage of suitable mates because of excessive crime, drug use, etc.
- A shortage of suitable mates because no default ideology and limited success in relationship counseling
- The surveillance society and the Internet never forgetting (although this is less important in the era of GenAI)
- The government keeping plenty of records on your juvenile behavior and performance that will be used against you later in life e.g. background checks for employment and guns
Thus, to have a high chance of success in avoiding ostracism (almost everyone’s goal), finding a good job (also almost everyone’s goal), and marrying someone with common values who can give you a family (the goal of half the population) that you like and actually can live with, that works out to adulthood at 12 years of age.
However, we are doing an exceptionally poor job of preparing children, and giving them what they need to be able to focus on these important decisions early in life. Here are some ways we can improve in our family life:
- Expose them to the realities of life at a much earlier age (like 8-10, lighter exposure even earlier) – in other words, as soon as they can handle it, you tell them about the cruelty in the world, how most mates are trash, rape culture, how tough it is to make a good living, revenge porn, social bullying in person and on the Internet, etc.
- Tiger mom them on academics – as much as you can without maiming their eyesight (you should still have them playing outside during the day)
- If you have the money, take them to different places and expose them to a wide range of different activities, like skiing, beaches, cars, planes, and all manner of hobbies and interests.
- Likewise, if there aren’t small children around the house, get them involved in babysitting and volunteering, so they can have a concrete opinion of what they think about smaller children.
- If they don’t have strong opinions, push them into finance, software/AI, or at least medicine – good careers instead of things they think they’ll sort of like.
- Work with the other parents on who is dating whom, and vet them in the ways that kids don’t yet understand.
- Show them how online dating, singles bars, etc. work and what the dating pool really is.
- Coach them on relationships and sex, even if they aren’t anywhere near that. Show them what divorce is about if you are happily married. Show them what two-parent families are like if you are a single parent.
- Limit the amount of dinosaurs, religion, superhero movies, etc. you are pumping into them. They don’t have the time for what almost certainly are fairy tales.
As a society, here are the things we need to be doing better:
- Matching people to careers based on how lucrative they are, and nudging them to higher paying ones.
- Businesses publishing all salaries and salary histories, so that we correctly judge the value of each job.
- Not supporting people to attend college for liberal arts majors that won’t significantly contribute to being able to get a high paying job.
- Better job matching when people are unemployed, instead of asking disoriented people to become an expert in half the economy.
- Better unification of business operations, communications, how you manage employees and supervisors, etc. so that people can study how to be successful instead of trying to figure it out by trial and error.
- Reducing the number of high-hour professions such as medicine and the law by limiting job scope, cutting red tape and complicated regulations, and working hour limits on non-critical professions.
- Providing a default political ideology, and political parties documenting and publicizing long-term ideologies, instead of asking young adults with way too much to do, to figure it all out themselves.
- Simplified government, taxation regime, etc. because time is the most important commodity.
and of course as an individual, the approach you have to take if you want to be happy is: in your teenage and early adult years, work as hard as you can at school, work, and in the marriage market, without seriously jeopardizing your health, following the above advice.