https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain/ an article i came across recently that i thought may be of interest to you and fellow YRAs :>
Thank you for sharing! Unfortunately I can't evaluate most the article's claims, given my ignorance of the relevant fields. (I tried to at least chase down some "underdeveloped prefrontal cortex" headlines to see if they're as flimsy as the author claims, but I only found one recent article that actually links to a study…and the study was behind a paywall. I'll try again later, since it seemed like a good idea and I'd like it pan out.)
In any case, I think that even if young people—and I'm including children here, not just teenagers—do have an inherent cognitive impairment that leads to worse decision-making, that's still not sufficient reason to take away their rights! Even if you don't think that individual rights are terminally important, the current "adults force children to make good decisions" system does not obviously lead to the best outcomes.
First, it's quite possible that "adults make better decisions for themselves" doesn't even translate to "adults make better decisions for and on behalf of young people." After all, nobody truly knows another person. What's good for you might be bad for me, and vice versa. Children have intimate knowledge of themselves that their adults lack; this might have a stronger positive effect on decision-making than the negative effect of a developing prefrontal cortex. (Not saying that's definitely the case, just that it's a possibility everyone seems to be overlooking.)
And the current system also has a bunch of harms associated with it.
Forcing people to act according to your wishes instead of their own a) often requires violence or the threat of violence to enforce, and b) is itself a form of coercion. When adults do this to each other, we call it "abuse." That's a harm.
When other people decide where you go and what you eat and when you sleep and who your friends are and everything else about your life, you end up feeling powerless, lacking agency. That's a harm.
When one person has socially sanctioned, absolute power over another, they can and often do get away with severe mistreatment and abuse. That's a harm.
Considering all the uncertainties and harms involved, I'd be really surprised if the current system is leading to better outcomes than letting children make decisions for themselves and learn from their mistakes—again, even supposing that adults are inherently, straightforwardly better at rational decision-making.
