Well, not so much the question as the answer. Bear with me, this gets a little long winded and perhaps more than a little pompous and presumptuous.

People, like everything else in the universe, are a continuum. We tend to categorize things in neat little boxes, but the truth is that those divisions are completely artificial.

Take the issue of heavenly bodies - what exactly is the difference between an asteroid and a minor planet, between a minor planet and a regular ol' planet, a rocky planet and a gas giant, a gas giant and a brown dwarf? These boundaries are our attempt at using language to differentiate between things for which there is no difference. One gram of matter more or less and an object is suddenly something different?

I view sexuality the same way. I don't think it's really accurate to describe someone's sexuality in terms of three or four or five little checkboxes, this one, that one, or the other one. It's more like a sliding scale, a long line with people falling at all points along it. I daresay as well that people fall at different places on that line depending on what day you look.

Children/teenagers/young adults/adults/old farts seem to work the same way to me. As a society, we assign specific numbers of years since birth to apply rules and language to what is really a continuum.

I've had this discussion in different forms with both of my kids. "How come you let her .....when she was my age, but not me?" or "He gets away with.... but you get upset when I do that!"

They're two different people, at different places along the continuum of maturity, and with different aspects of themselves at different places, and in different places on different days.

I don't have a good answer to the question, but I'm not sure there is one, or could ever be one, if all that bloviating makes any sense.

But at the end of the day, we need lines between this and that for practical reasons. Those lines should be based on well thought out and well educated consensus, and I'm of the opinion that in many cases those lines are currently based on nothing more than one or another group's agenda-driven whim.

Case in point - What sense does it make to say that a person is mature enough at seventeen years since birth to make the decision to lay down their life as a member of the armed forces, but in the next breath say that same person is not mature enough to enter a strip club and have a glass of wine and look at naked people?  Hello?

Feel free to read whatever's left of my own thoughts at Crowded Head, Cozy Bed
The Boy in JanieBelle's head