Women - the most responsible teenager of the house?

At first it may seem like an assault against your good senses to think of adult women as mere children or teenagers. How could they be? They go through life and mature just like men do, don’t they? Once they are thirty or forty, don’t they behave as adults just as thirty or forty year old men do? Actually, there is much evidence to the contrary. Perhaps men are so keen to believe that women mature the same as them (throughout their entire lives) because in the early stages of our lives, females do actually mature faster than males.

”The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight and twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is a reason of very narrow limitations. This is why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling things to the most important.” -- Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women (1851)

The difference between men and women in maturity, however, is that while females mature earlier in life, they also stop maturing at around the age of eighteen, as Schopenhauer aptly observes. And while men don’t catch up to women’s maturity until they reach around age twenty-eight, after that the men keep maturing - often throughout their entire lives. William James describes the same process of maturation in Principles of Psychology, where he states:

It becomes like comparing three-month fermented wine served in a box of Chateau Cardboard to single malt scotch aged for decades in an oak cask. As such, women do mature faster than males but stop maturing at around the mentality of an eighteen year old (or also, I suppose, to the maturity of a 28 year old man), leaving the woman as literally, the most responsible teenager in the house. It is interesting to note as well how many men claim that it is at around age 27 or 28 that they begin to “figure things out” in regard to women, or at least much more so than they did earlier in life.

”Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, and foolish, and shortsighted – in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strictest sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best of intentions, could do in her place.” -- Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women (1851)

See full article here:http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2012/06/woman-most-responsible-teenager-in.html