Why did we set 18 as the age of majority?

Question

I’m not asking this from a biology lens, I get that aspect, but more from the sociology/anthropology lens. My question is which culture started using 18 as this hard cutoff, when, and under what reasoning.

In: Other

Answer 1

First, it’s **not** a “hard cut-off in most societies.

In most societies, the process of encouraging, developing, and requiring increasing degrees of decision-making an autonomy starts around puberty. That’s when we start allowing children to make decisions in their education in terms of elective classes and scheduling. Labor laws allow limited employment at early teenage years, with restrictions on scheduling and hours worked easing the closer said child gets to 18. Driving laws allow for conditional driving permits as early as 14, with various stages leading up to an unrestricted license at 18. Many banking regulations allow deposit accounts for minors with a parent on the account before allowing sole-ownership accounts at 18. And many places have “Romeo and Juliet” laws allowing for sexual consent *between* minors provided they are above a minimum age and the gap between partners is small enough.

So it’s greatly misleading to say that this is a hard-cut off, rather than being the very end of a gradual progression of increasing rights and privileges that began years earlier.

It’s worth pointing that at a social/cultural level, 18 is not the complete end of this spectrum. Some countries restrict the use of alcohol, tobacco, and/or cannabis to 21. Most car rental businesses restrict rentals to persons over the age of 24.

And this concept, of a gradual progression of growing autonomy, that starts as early as 12, assumes that young people will spend their teenage years getting limited-but-increasing experience with working, and thus with managing their money, dating, and with general concepts like keeping promises and making commitments. So the underlying idea is that after two to six years of this, people will have enough experience to not be too horribly exploited, so we allow 18 year olds to enter into contracts, including borrowing, military service, voting, employment, and so on.