Should parents make decisions for their teenage children?
First of all, it is not easy to define if people at the age of 15 to 18 are adults or children because they are physically grown up and intelligent enough to carry out general work like adults do in a company, while a lot of them are under their parents’ control. I believe that they should be able to make important decisions by themselves, no matter how hard for them.
Needless to say, the recognition of age and maturity is not universally identical. There were some times that 15 to 18 years old were recognized as adults and supposed to think and act independently. It was usual for women at the age of 15 to get married in my grandmother’s generation in Japan. Even in the present days, it is still a common thing in some developing countries. Thus, I guess it depends on whether the community is wealthy enough for 15 to 18 year-old children to be children or not. Women in my grandmother’s generation needed to get married as soon as possible and have about 10 children in order to get enough labor forces for their family business and have them taking care of their parents and grandparents. In those days, children must have grown up with prediction of earlier age they had been supposed to become independent.
These days, women in developed countries do not need to have so many children anymore and they can go on to higher education, by comparison with early times. It has enabled mothers to get a job as well as fathers in order to make their family wealthier and keep their children beside them longer. As children are not expected to be important labor forces for their family anymore, it may not really matter if they are mature enough to make important decisions. Then how do children predict themselves to be independent at the age of 15 to 18 in such a situation?
I strongly believe that this phenomenon has made today’s adults more immature and immoral. I could not believe that a lot of 20 year-old Japanese people attended the ceremony for Coming of Age Day with their parents this year. Unless adults stop treating young people like children, future adults will become even more immature. They still need parents’ and other adults’ advice to make important decisions but I cannot agree with the title statement: parents or other adult relatives should make important decisions for their older teenage children. I would say that it is no more than spoiling children.
