Hi there! Your post about brain age stuck a chord with me; I got significant brain damage in an accident when I was 20, and I've been struggling to take control back from a bunch of well-meaning and overprotective people, ranging from my neurologist to my siblings. So thank you for that. I do have a question for you. I've found a lot of the people who use the brain development age are the people who (idk what word to use for this) self-infantilize themselves. Why do you think people do this, and how can we combat this? I find that it's harder to argue against when they want to be protected, and that they think I need to be protected.
This is a great question. I have some thoughts on why people tend to self-infantilize. If people think of something as desirable for themselves, it's harder to convince them that it's wrong to do to others. Theoretically, even if people infantilize themselves, we should be able to tell them that it's wrong to do to other people without their consent -- but since the root of infantilization is the premise that the subject is incapable of meaningfully consenting to things, that doesn't necessarily work.
So anyway, I have some theories. I think there's significant overlap between this worldview and the medical model of mental difference. This is specific to a U.S. Cultural context; other people can weigh in on how this does/doesn't apply in other places/cultures.
Our society is obsessed with blaming people's external circumstances on their "bad choices." Underpaid? Your fault for not choosing a better job! Abused? Your fault for being so abusable! People will comb through every bit of struggling/oppressed people's history to find something they "did wrong" that would justify whatever bad thing happened to them or was done to them. In particular, there's tremendous emphasis on "bad decisions" in youth (if you skip algebra class, it will go on your Permanent Record and your life will be RUINED!). In this context, it can seem liberatory to counteract that narrative with "My problems aren't the fault of my bad choices; I'm a child much too young to be capable of even making choices."
Similarly/relatedly to the above, in the age of mass incarceration, trying minors as adults, and a general pattern of incarcerating marginalized young people to long prison sentences for relatively petty crimes, pushback to this policy heavily centers the idea that the wrongness of this cruelty is rooted in young people being essentially incapable of making choices and therefore not being truly responsible for their actions.
Young people (meaning both minors and young adults) are relentlessly sexually objectified. Obviously, most people don't become comfortable being sexually objectified just because they turn 18, but some young adults contextualize this as "It's wrong to sexualize me because I'm A Child" rather than "The way people sexually objectify young people is dehumanizing and harmful."
Relatedly, because young people are often disempowered, and it's socially acceptable to treat young people like garbage, young people are often targeted for abusive/exploitative relationships, financial arrangements, and other abusive and exploitative situations, and this targeting often kicks up when young people come of age, because they then may have resources they can legally access and sign away. People victimized by this are encouraged to see the problem as "I am a child and they are a child abuser" rather than "I was/am denied social and economic power and was put in a desperate situation, which they exploited.
People who grew up with unsupportive parents may conceptualize that lack of support as "I'm an immature child, and they've forced me to grow up too soon, but if they recognized that I'm still a child, they would take better care of me."
Basically, short version: I think young adults are encouraged to self-infantalize, even though I think it's contrary to their long-term interests (not that they asked me), because young people are treated like hot garbage, and young adults are encouraged to frame this problem as "I'm being denied the protections that children get," but I think they're mistaken, because children are absolutely not protected in the first place.
