[SCA] Pennsic policy games

[cellio]

The big new bit of stupidity -- this time not from the SCA board of directors -- is a new Pennsic rule that minors, meaning people under 18, cannot attend classes without being accompanied by an adult. I guess it's just too dangerous for a 16-year-old to learn Italian dance or a 17-year-old to learn how to spin wool, or something. This is totally

Comments

[osewalrus]

It's multiple transitions, but they happen through teenage-hood and early 20s as well.

There are a bunch of huge cognitive leaps that kick in at various stages, although they vary enormously even among adults. Some kick in very young. For example, the idea of "object permanence" does not generally kick in until about age 3 or so. "Object permanence" is the idea that an object as permanence. This is why the "peek-a-boo" game works on babies. Babies don't know that your face is still there when it's covered. It's something they learn not simply through experience, but because at some point they develop mental capacity to actually store, absorb, and remember the specific experience and generalize it out to all experiences.

A young child generally lacks an ability to foresee long term consequence. Again, that's not a lack of knowledge/experience thing. Its a cognitive inability to generalize out from specific information to an abstract, indefinite future.

Another raft of changes kick in at puberty, which are often masked by the fact that other physical changes are releasing lots of hormones that play hob with emotional reactions and processing.

All of this is gross generalization, and is also based on the current prevalent theory of cognitive development (or at least, the parts with which I am current). understanding around this stuff changes a great deal, and individuals vary wildly amidst these general rules. There are certainly children who acquire particular cognitive abilities at a very young age, and adults who lack more than basic ability to generalize from specific data.

The bottom line is that there really is a concept of "age appropriate" that is neither pets nor small, less knowledgeable grown ups. An 8 year old child has characteristics as different from a 4 year old child as from a 12 year old child, and treating an 8 year old like a 12 year old is not any better for the child than treating an 8 year old like a 4 year old.