If they can’t buy their own loo roll, should they really vote?

IN the summer of 1985 there was a number one single which gave teenagers like me pause. The Paul Hardcastle hit 19 was so called because that was supposedly the average age of American combat soldiers in the Vietnam War.

I was 17 at the time and did not feel at all prepared for military service. The car I was driving still had Lplates on and belonged to a grownup, not me. It was the autumn of that year before I moved away from home and cooked my own meals.

The whiskers on my chin were as fuzzy as my political views which, according to the law, were not sufficiently mature to be expressed in a general election.

Fight a war? I am afraid I was too much of a rookie at adulthood to countenance such a thing.

Blame my sheltered upbringing and the parents who encouraged me to stay on at school for S5 and S6, but I was probably 18 or 19 before I truly stood on my own two feet.

All of which lends a certain bombshell quality to the findings of a new survey by OnePoll which has identified the age at which people reckon adulthood is achieved today. It is 26.

You read that correctly. The young folk that the old folk used to shake their heads at and lament that ‘they grow up so quickly these days’ now take more than a quarter of a century to become big boys and girls.

Bloomer

Twenty six? Even I, a comparatively late bloomer due to further education commitments, had been in full-time employment for four years by then and had a mortgage and monthly bills.

My parents, by that age, were married homeowners with a rusting red Mini, two screaming kids and dinner parties to throw.

At 26, George Harrison’s tenyear career as a Beatle ended and Bjorn Borg, having won 11 Grand Slam singles titles including five Wimbledons in a row, decided the game was up and he should retire.

A few decades later, it seems, this is the stage in life at which we are finally ready to stop being children.

For those who are nearing this threshold, a checklist of grown-up activities has been compiled from responses to the survey to help them decide whether they are on target to mature in line with their peers.

For example, by the age of 26, some previous experience of mowing a lawn is to be expected and most people will be able to dress appropriately for the weather without help from mummy or daddy.

Many young people will have bought clothes all by themselves. Most will even, at some point in their lives, have taken on the responsibility of purchasing toilet paper.

Other rites of passage normally in the rear view mirror by the age of 26 include changing a lightbulb, making your own dinner and going on holiday without your parents.

By what age, I wonder, do they experience the onset of embarrassment at their snail’s pace progress towards self-sufficiency?

Another question: if it takes until their mid-20s for young people to bag a reasonable number of so called adult experiences like mowing lawns and changing lightbulbs, how the devil are they spending their teens?

Shoot them a glance on the sofa and discover the main answer immediately. They are spending these vital years on their phones – sending overexcited messages peppered with emojis and grammar fails and posing for sultry selfies to post on social media.

They are, in fairness, not always on their phones.

Sometimes they are in shops seeking better versions of their mobile which (oh, the ignominy!) was almost 18 months old.

Never fear, the new iPhone 11 has just been unveiled and, as British techy analyst Ben Wood commented, somewhat alarmingly, this week, this one ‘will allow users to get to new levels of narcissism’.

Infants

Many will consider that the old levels of narcissism were time-consuming enough, leaving little space in the day for under-26s living at home with their parents for, say, mowing the family lawn or nipping out to a shop to buy their own grub.

To a degree, I suppose, I do today’s generation of overgrown infants a disservice. They live with their parents for longer for valid economic reasons – buying or renting property is much more expensive now than when I was on the cusp of adulthood – and they lack life experience precisely because they have yet to fly the coop.

But staying at home in your late teens or early 20s cannot be some access-all-areas ticket to free cooking and cleaning and a fridge which magically replenishes itself.

It should involve an element of responsibility – and contribution – on the part of the fully grown progeny who has yet to find his or her way out of the nest.

They are, after all, old enough to vote.

Talking of which, isn’t it curious that the Scottish Government is so keen to lower the voting age to 16 for all elections following the apparent ‘success’ of involving 16 and 17-year-olds in the 2014 independence referendum?

I say curious because, by young people’s own admission, they are still a decade short of adulthood by 16.

Are we expecting a bit much of them?

If they really are determined to drag their childhoods into the second half of their 20s would it not make more sense to raise the voting age?