Jem's Coming-Of-Age

Teenagers are known for being immature and not the brightest when it comes to handling situations by themselves, but everyone must grow up sooner or later. Without teenagers going through these hardships where would the world be, we all must learn some lessons the hard way to grow up into functioning people. One thing that involves during growing up is realizing other people’s problems around you. Coming-of-age involves recognizing perspectives.

In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird Jem is an example of a character whose coming-of-age process involves gaining a different perspective. Jem at the beginning of the book is 10 years old and is very immature and does not know much about the world considering he has never left Maycomb county. He

Teens are known for being reckless, problematic, immature, stupid, etc, but David Dobbs begs to differ using the event of his son’s “mistake” as an example. Dobb’s son decided it was fine to go 113 MPH down the highway. He finds it outrageous at first, and so was the cop giving him a long citations on his ticket, one of them being reckless driving. Dobb’s son thinks this is inaccurate because it makes it sound like he was not careful,Dobb’s son explains that there was barely any cars around, it was perfectly clear out, there was no wet roads, it was the perfect condition to do something outrageous like that. After his son’s testimony to his actions, he realized that he was right. The author states that “We’re so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what makes the period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptable period.” (Dobbs) This is very true, Dobb’s son telling us his thinking to his father makes his father put himself in that situation.After Dobb’s does this he goes speaks about how the brain acts during adolescence and how it goes through physical changes that make it a faster and more complex, and getting smarter and smarter as the the days go by. This means that we are still developing way more than we originally thought. “... casts teens less as a rough draft than and more of an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptive creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.” (Dobbs) is what the author calls it. Although Dobbs says all these things about people in adolescence he does say that they are almost perfect for the job. Which is why teens are criticized in the first place, although they are getting smarter as the day goes on, they are very clumsy