_lacroix

I totally agree with you on this. Kids can take on more responsibility than they're given today - see any generation that came of age before the last 15-20 years. It would benefit many of them enormously to do so (jobs, babysitting, driving, etc). I just think it's too easy as an adult to look back on your teenage years and project your current level of social and emotional development onto your younger self or teenagers in general.

Humans are social animals. Those silly side effects of school, "having fun together and bonding" with people outside of your family, are critical to growing up to be a well-adjusted adult who can maintain relationships and friendships - which are ultimately the things that make life worthwhile.

But most adults do spend most of their waking time with 30+ other adults (at a point in life when the differences between ages start to flatten out quite a bit). It looks quite analogous to me.

Purely anecdotal of course but the kids I met in college who were nerdy and studious and sat out that kind of social jockeying in high school were the biggest jackasses in college because they hadn't gotten any of that out of their systems yet. I kinda think we need to learn a lot of this stuff from experience - we don't learn compassion by being told to be compassionate, we learn compassion by looking back with a more mature perspective on our own actions and how they affected other people. Middle school and early high school made Mean Girls look like a documentary and while it wasn't the best time in my life I learned how to be a much better person from those experiences where I was on both the giving and the receiving end of the teenage nastiness. People are going to learn these things one way or another because we're not all born saints; in my opinion it's better to do so alongside immature peers when the stakes are lower than to do it later on as an adult.

Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment

But imagine you didn't do any of those things and therefore weren't as social in high school. Would you be as well-adjusted as an adult? Or would you have felt isolated in ways that affected your development and left you worse off in adulthood? All the teenage cringe is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it's awful in retrospect.

Also anecdotal but I was the first child of young parents with no siblings, cousins, or children of parents' friends around for a lot of my life. When other kids did come along in our social circle they were much younger so I spent a lot of time socializing with the adults instead. I had to consciously context-switch my behavior to a huuuuuuge degree whenever I spent time with my friends at school and such because acting the way I did in a lot of my life outside school just didn't work. Nobody would have understood how to relate to me. I've always been very social and never had any anxiety around it but I still had to put in some work to act normally around other kids/teenagers after spending so much time with adults. And I went to a normal public school and did a zillion activities with other kids!

> They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.

This is exactly the problem. They can relate to adults but not to their teenage peers. I'd bet they feel terribly uncomfortable at social events with only kids their age present.

This is how my doctor explained psychedelic therapy to me - it triggers a massive release in BDNF that stimulates neuroplasticity, which allows for long term changes to occur. The trip itself can be a catalyst for reflective experiences that help with the growth of positive new neural circuitry but it is by no means the most important aspect of the treatment. In the case of ketamine, which is what I did, the release of BDNF continues for hours after the trip ends.

Yes, I would be very curious as to your sources for this. I did medically supervised psychedelic treatment; I found the setting rather unpleasant because it took place in a doctor's office and one of the many anxieties I was treating was a lifelong phobia of germs and anything medical. This was a far cry from a sweat lodge or from recreational psychedelic experiences I've had with friends in nature etc. I did not enjoy all of my trips and some were hardly even reflective experiences because they caused me so much anxiety in the moment, yet I got massive psychological benefits from them nonetheless.

Makes perfect sense to me. I used IV ketamine infusions to treat anxiety and OCD. The effects I felt are very similar to what the patient in the article (and many other commenters on this post) describes; it's like my brain rewired itself in a way that allowed me to break out of negative patterns. I was suddenly able to consciously tell my brain to stop when I could feel myself going into a familiar anxiety spiral - and it WORKED. I had a sense of clarity about myself and my life that I had never experienced before. As a bonus, I went from being a frequent binge drinker to having literally zero desire to drink at all. It's not like waking up with a hangover and never wanting to drink again; I feel like I did as a child before I'd ever tried it at all and wasn't capable of craving the feeling of being drunk.