Learning to Be an Adult
The other day I was motivated to explain something to my kids, so I started telling a story that I felt perfectly illustrated my point. Right after I started telling it, though, my kids said “oh, the one about Suzy the cow? We’ve heard this one before.” Like a million times, they already know the story by heart. I have to admit I’m a little mortified by how often I get this response, especially since I myself often have the same reaction to my mother’s (often repeated) stories. I’m guessing you too have had this experience.
For most of human history, people did not go to school or read and yet they were able to survive and thrive in complex societies with high levels of skill based industries. Just feeding people takes an extraordinary amount of work, knowledge and skill, the human diet requires complicated preparation, processing and storage. If you were to look at a list of all the things one needs to know how to do in order to be an adult, you might be amazed - it is an incredibly long list. And how do we learn them? Mostly from our mothers and the other adults that we grow up with.
Humans exist in complex, social environments and many of their needs for survival depends on social cooperation. Adult skills are learned from other people, either directly or through observation and imitation. The human ability to learn has enabled us to adapt to the environment more quickly than we could through genetic evolution alone. Learning is the route through which behaviors, skills and knowledge pass between generations and it has made such things as language possible. Our brain and our culture have evolved together and so our neurological development is structured to enable us to naturally gain the knowledge and skills we need to survive in both the natural and the cultural environment that we have been born into.
At root, learning is a biological process. All animals have a course of development that ensures that individuals learn everything they need to know about how to interact with their environment in order to survive and reproduce. Because of cultural evolution and our social environment, human children have a much longer and slower course of development. Essentially, during childhood, human brains are making connections. Then, in adolescence, something called synaptic pruning occurs, leading to some connections being reinforced and others being removed. Many of the challenging behaviors we associate with teenagers and young adults are symptoms of this neurological development. The end result is a more efficient and more specialized adult brain which is capable of decision making, emotional control, and complex reasoning.
The skills necessary for human survival are complex and require years of learning to master before individuals can function as adults. Cultural evolution has enabled humans to adjust rapidly to changing environmental conditions, leading to our successful adaptation to almost all of the earth’s ecosystems. One of the reasons why young people today may seem more immature that priors generations is that the skills and knowledge required to be an independent adult in our rapidly evolving culture is greater and more complex now then it was even 30-60 years ago. Fortunately, our biology supports learning throughout one’s life, enabling human adaptation to such rapid change.