We all love it when we see a young person who carries themselves well and shows signs of being mature. They interact with adults in an adult manner. Nancy Adler notes that adult development and maturity theories on maturity emphasize a clear comprehension of life’s purpose, directedness, and intentionality, which contributes to the feeling that life is meaningful.
Tim Elmore founded Growing Leaders, an international non-profit organization created to develop emerging leaders. His company provides a list of what he considers to be the marks of maturity.
While the list isn’t exhaustive, it lists the characteristics that he notices in young people who are unusually mature, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. If you are a parent—this is a good list of qualities to begin developing in your child.
A mature person is able to keep long-term commitments.
One key signal of maturity is the ability to delay gratification. Part of this means a student is able to keep commitments even when they are no longer new or novel. Theycan commit to continue doing what is right even when they don’t feel like it.
A mature person is unshaken by flattery or criticism.
As people mature, they sooner or later understand that nothing is as good as it seems and nothing is as bad as it seems. Mature people can receive compliments or criticism without letting it ruin them or sway them into a distorted view of themselves. They are secure in their identity.
A mature person possesses a spirit of humility.
Humility parallels maturity. Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less. Mature people aren’t consumed with drawing attention to themselves. They see how others have contributed to their success and can even sincerely give honor to who nurtured that talent in them. This is the opposite of arrogance.
A mature person’s decisions are based on character not feelings.
Mature people—students or adults—live by values. They have principles that guide their decisions. They are able to progress beyond merely reacting to life’s options, and be proactive as they live their life. Their character is master over their emotions.
A mature person expresses
I have found the more I mature, the more grateful I am, for both big and little things. Immature children presume they deserve everything good that happens to them. Mature people see the big picture and realize how good they have it, compared to most of the world’s population.
A mature person knows how to prioritize others before themselves.
A wise man once said: A mature person is one whose agenda revolves around others, not self. Certainly this can go to an extreme and be unhealthy, but I believe a pathway out of childishness is getting past your own desires and beginning to live to meet the needs of others less fortunate.
A mature person seeks wisdom before acting.
Finally, a mature person is teachable. They don’t presume they have all the answers. The wiser they get the more they realize they need more wisdom. They’re not ashamed of seeking counsel from adults (teachers, parents, coaches) or from other sources. Only the wise seek wisdom.
Unfortunately not everyone matures at same rate. In a British study it was revealed that men have about an eleven year lag behind women when it comes to maturity. These findings can be re-affirmed with previous studies conducted on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the part of the brain just behind the forehead that is responsible for a lot of men’s shortcomings. This brain region controls cognitive analysis and abstract thought, as well as corrective behavior in social situations.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have made it possible for scientists to watch the rate at which the PFC matures, and have discovered the male brain doesn’t fully develop until age 25. Meanwhile, women experience a maturity rate of 21 years-old.
MRIs have revealed the brain has a developmental process that tends to occur from the back of the brain to the front, which explains why the prefrontal cortex develops last. With an immature PFC, even though the person can intellectualize dangerous situation or poor behavior, they may engage regardless. The slowness of a man’s brain maturation can explain the list of maturity failings, and their own recognition and admittance of those failings.
Krystnell Storr has a Master’s degree in science, health and environmental reporting from NYU. In her article Science Explains Why Women Are Faster to Mature Then Men; she reviews a 2013 study published in Cerebral Cortex that offers a scientific explanation behind the common notion that men take longer to “act their age” than women do. According to the study, maturity is rooted in the fact that the female brain establishes connections and “prunes” itself faster than the male brain. “It seems that the process starts a few years after birth and continues to occur until around 40 years old,” co-author Sol Lim reports.
Lim explained that the human brain undergoes major changes anatomically and functionally as we age, and these changes make the connections in our brain more efficient. Notably, Lim’s research found that this process tends to happen at an earlier age for women than men, which may explain why some women seem to mature faster than men. For the first few years of life, there’s an “initial overabundance of neurons, connections, folding of the brain surface,” Lim said. “After that, [a] ‘pruning’ process occurs for refinement, to make the brain network more economic and efficient.” It might seem strange to think of the brain condensing as it improves rather than expanding, but that helps to explain this particular maturation effect.
At birth, men and women have about the same number of brain fibers. These fibers create a network that helps us to learn and develop. As we get older, the brain finds a faster way to communicate messages from one region to another.
Think of it like having a face-to-face conversation with someone instead of shouting to them across a loud and crowded room. Instead of potentially losing your message in a noisy room, your message is more likely to be received correctly, in a more direct message. When the amount of fibers gets streamlined, they are relaying more focused information directly to the region of the brain they need to target. “This selective pruning process, which we called preferential detachment, preserves core properties of the brain network that are crucial for information processing and cognitive development,” said Lim.
This process seems to occur earlier in females than in males and could explain why cognitively, women tend to be ahead of the curve in terms of maturity. The brains of females are further along in the reorganization process and, for at least a few years, may be working more efficiently than a male’s. So how different are men and women? Maturity is in the brain of the beholder — but because female brains get pruned faster than males ones, it takes a little longer to show up in men.
But aside from that, understanding how our brain wires itself is key to understanding how mental illnesses and conditions develop. By uncovering our brain’s pruning system, this study takes us a bit closer to that goal. It also adds to the growing body of research that looks into gender differences when it comes to the brain. Since everything in the body is connected in some way, the next step would be for scientists to connect this difference to other effects around the body. There may never be an acceptable excuse for why men typically find more humor in their own passing of gas and burping than women, but the science points to a difference in the way our brains develop. Who can argue with that?
References
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/artificial-maturity/201211/the-marks-maturity
http://mic.com/articles/111226/science-explains-why-women-are-faster-to-mature-than-men