Dangerous Fourteen

An expression "dangerous fourteen (危险的14岁)" has caught my attention these few days. Although I do not remember where I saw it, I must have seen it on a mainland Chinese website as I remember these words in the simplified Chinese...

Maybe it is a headline of a news article about a violent crime by a fourteen-year-old. I do not know. Even though this word caught my attention, I did not click the link. Perhaps my unconscious mind wanted me (my conscious mind) to ponder about this without being influenced by the news report...

Well, I think a fourteen-year-old boy is quite dangerous in some ways. I know it because I also was like a walking arsenal when I was fourteen a bit more than two decades ago.

A boy or a girl of 14 is biologically adult already. I remember that St. Augustine became a father at 14. And it is often said Virgin Mary was 14 when she conceived Jesus. Although boys tend to have a few more years of upward growth, girls usually stop growing vertically around this age. Anyway, a human being is usually fully reproductive by 14.

A woman who had delivered a baby at 14 told me that bearing a baby had been easy like pooping... Compare this with the terrible pain of a thirty-something at her first childbirth. We can see how narutal it is for a 14-year-old to deliver a baby. (I have to make it clear that I do not advocate teen reproduction. I believer that a 14-year-old is far from socially or psychologically mature.)

And look at kittens and puppies. After they grow up to the size of their parents, they become independent and start mating. They are fully adult. Maybe human was like them until quite recently, well, until a few hundred years ago in the West. We can still see it in some Islamic countries. (And from the age of consent in the Japanese criminal codes, that was 13 before the revision in 1990s.)

I do not know when and why humans chose the late reproduction. And I feel it was a right decision. But I believe the wide gap between biological and social/political adulthoods (four to seven years) is the reason of general irritability of teenagers. I guess giving them some social rights and responsibility could be the way to make fourteen-year-olds less dangerous...