TOEFL Essay: Adulthood
by Mr. Jeenn Lee Hsieh
谢振礼老师海外投稿
》People recognize a difference between children and adults. What events--experiences and ceremonies--make a child an adult? Use specific reasons and examples to explain your answer.
Age is a period of time as well as a state of mind. Time reveals age. It is physically discernible between children and adults. However, it is more than meets the eye to immediately tell a mature mind from a relatively immature mind. On the one hand, there are events and ceremonies to mark ages from stage to stage, such as birthdays and baptism. On the other, it takes only experiences in experiments characterized by confusion in no-longer childhood and not-yet adulthood. This puzzling period of prolonged adolescence often witnesses a child becoming a man or a woman.
Numbers of age do not fail. Teenagers are adolescents clearly marked in ages from 13 to 19, apparently time enough to find their way to adulthood through the stage of puppetry. It happens to be the most difficult, if not the most important stage of life, being a transitional period for physical changes which are to leave childhood behind. During this period of time, boys and girls change both physically and mentally, with the general belief that females advance physically faster than males into adulthood because of biologically differences. This physical transformation is, of course, easier to explain. What is less obvious is the mental state lapping between maturity or otherwise.
The immature minds of adults-to-be usually show a lack of that kind of experiences which are common among adults responsible for themselves and for others around them. In other words, maturity as such comes with a growing sense of responsibility for life. The carefree childhood seemingly has to disappear, giving way for adulthood to enter into life. It is a mental process of young minds becoming ready to face responsibility on their own, independent of parental protection. That is, a child grows up both mentally and physically into an adult.
In fact, childhood never really dies in adulthood. It may just fade away. It is quite confusing between childhood and adulthood sometimes. This phenomenon is particularly typical of the transitional stage of adolescence, now crying like kids, now dreaming to conquer the complexity of life like grown-ups. In later stages of life as a journey, especially during the last part of adulthood, childishness may come back again. There is nothing unusual about some sort of mental state of a child lingering for the rest of life. Human beings grow old and die. Perhaps at an old age they do not have to lose childish innocence altogether.
