By age four or thereabouts, human beings have a fully developed communication system which, for all intents and purposes, makes them mature persons. They are capable of expressing themselves, of understanding what's said to them, and of structuring continuous thought; and they are capable of doing things with their environment. You could ask whether a person age four and up belongs at all in a book on child rearing, because I don't consider someone over that age to be a child. To a certain extent the subject doesn't belong here, and yet society considers people to be children until a much older age than four, and so we have to discuss this largely because society forces it on us . . .

. . . I want to explain what I mean by a person over four being mature . . .

. . . A person aged fifty can have just as many difficulties solving a problem as a person aged five. A person aged fifty confronted with a new situation can feel just as helpless as a child. We have phrases for this in our language; we talk about older people confronted with difficult situations and refer to them as being "like children." Actually, the language reflects society's prejudices . . .

. . . It is the need to turn them into robots that takes time . . .

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"Ages Four and Up", from Child Rearing, by Daniel Greenberg
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