Sixteen

My experience is that little children very much want to belong to their parents. From the time they start crawling, there is an invisible rubber band connecting them to their mother or father, and when it gets stretched too far, they go looking for the missing parent. As they get older, they understand that their parents can be gone for a while and then come back. But they still tend to prefer being with parents to not.

Around age eight or so, most children have started to spend more time doing their own thing. For my children, this typically means reading, playing outdoors away from the patio door, drawing, or making an art store (so that I can pay them real money for artwork they made with craft supplies that I bought...children are such hopeful entrepreneurs).

Then adolescence hits, and they start being able to reason as well as adults, even though their executive function and impulse control are still developing. 

I remember an occasion when the judge I clerked for interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl in his chambers during a custody dispute. He explained to her that he was the ultimate decision maker, but that due to her age he was willing to hear her input on which parent she should live with and why. No, she wasn't an adult, and he made that clear; however, he also accepted that she was close to adulthood and deserved to be treated accordingly. In the end, he decided to have her live primarily with the parent that she wanted to live with.

When I was fourteen, my mother signed me up for a college class one summer and bought me a city bus pass. Then she basically turned me loose to study and go around town on my own for two months. When I was nearly seventeen, she let me go to college full-time. Yes, the university was only three miles away from her house, but I lived in on-campus housing. Both of those experiences promoted my ability to function in the adult world, and I'm grateful for the appropriate levels of freedom she granted me as a teenager.

While doing yard work recently, I was sad to overhear a neighbor boy matter-of-factly tell a visitor how he was allowed to bike on just a few of the streets in the immediate vicinity. It sounded like he never leaves our neighborhood on his own, not even to just grab a slushee at a convenience store. I believe the boy is fifteen or sixteen years old. His homeschooling parents subscribe to a very "protective" (i.e., isolating) way of bringing up their children. Don't the parents realize that part of their job is to prepare their children to be adults? No matter what they do, their children will age. Whether the children mature into adults capable of doing their own shopping and independent living seems to be at risk. 

Sixteen year old people are able to drive and/or marry in much of the world, so it disturbs me to see this neighbor boy being restricted as though he were a much younger child. I've never seen any sign of criminal or bad behavior in him that would justify the near imprisonment he lives in.