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The eighteenth birthday has long been considered one of life’s big milestones, with society officially dubbing you an ‘adult’. However, more and more this title seems obsolete. When asked what being ‘an adult’ really means, most people consider it a point at which you are suddenly granted significant freedom, revolutionising your life, but is this really still the case?
For politically engaged English teenagers, turning eighteen presents the opportunity to vote for the first time, allowing them to participate in society and the democratic process for the first time. A big responsibility and the marker of becoming an adult, some may suggest. While this is true, Scottish teenagers are able to vote in Scottish Parliamentary elections and be involved with votes for the local government from the age of sixteen, meaning they are entrusted with an ‘adult’s’ responsibility two years before they reach the legal age of majority. However, given no one in the UK is eligible to vote in a UK Parliamentary election until they reach eighteen, this milestone does come with new voting freedoms, they just seem to be less life-changing freedoms than expected, particularly for Scottish people.
Similar situations can be seen when considering driving, given that a full UK licence can be held from the age of seventeen, or looking at the fact that throughout the UK the age of consent is sixteen, indicating that teenagers are capable of consenting two whole years before they are adults. Both circumstances seem to show that teenagers are known to be more than capable of handling significant responsibility far before they are legally adults. Here, again, turning eighteen seems to pose little change to teenagers’ lives, and the responsibilities that teenagers now hold before this birthday arguably make them eligible for the title of ‘adult’ far before their birthdays, making the eighteenth birthday seem an unsuitable starting line for the beginning of adulthood.
At the recent Conservative Party Conference, Rishi Sunak proposed smoking legislation that further confuses the issue of adulthood in the UK. His suggestion to raise the legal smoking age by one year every year, which means that individuals born in 2009 would never be of legal smoking age, is made in hopes of creating a “smokefree generation”, attempting to cut access to cigarettes before they become an issue in yet another bracket of young people.
While a noble wish, the legislation put forward is an additional complication to the consideration of the age of majority, as it will make people over the age of eighteen, under the legal smoking age, robbing them of the freedoms they are supposed to take on as they reach adulthood. This legislation would join adoption legislation in being one of a few instances in which being eighteen practically means nothing, as adoption regulations require individuals to be over the age of twenty-one before adopting. As such, the idea that becoming an ‘adult’ gives access to legal freedoms is countered here, and an argument for twenty-one to be considered the new benchmark for adulthood is posed.
Ultimately, throughout the UK teenagers are already being given ‘adult’ responsibilities far before they reach that age of majority. The 18th birthday seems to hold little significance anymore as is, and with the potential implementation of Sunak’s smoking legislation its importance appears to be declining further. The question stands, therefore, when can someone truly be considered an adult, if 18 is no longer an overly useful benchmark?
Image: Jessica Diamond, 2008 // CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
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