Maturity, Part II
Who Gets Called Mature?
Originally published on Blogger on July 26, 2013. Revised on April 21, 2026.
*As always, names are changed to protect people’s privacy.
When I was thirteen years old, I attended a summer arts day camp at a Quaker school in southeastern Pennsylvania. The summer of 1994 would mark my sixth summer there and, as was my personal tradition, I wanted to attack an ambitious project in shop class. Mr. Paul, a teacher at the school who also used to serve as the camp director and shop instructor, had recently stepped down from his posts and ultimately handed off both positions to a woman named Mrs. Fennick. However, he often visited throughout the summer, and made a point to say “hello” to me. To him, I had become well-known for my summer-long shop projects, in contrast to the other kids, who generally copied fairly basic sample projects on display on the shelves. So when he came to visit shop class one day early in the season, he asked me, “What are you making this year?” And I responded by showing him this:
I handed Mr. Paul my schematic of a Pitcairn Autogyro. He laughed and said, “It’s never something easy, is it?” Then he looked it over and said, “Your plans are really concise” (I think he meant “precise,” but whatever!).
When I reconnected and caught up with Mr. Paul on Facebook about fifteen years later, he said that he remembered me well, how I had seemed different from many of the other kids that he worked with, and that he wasn’t really surprised that I was “on the spectrum.” He also commented, in reference to how seriously I took my projects— in shop as well as other classes— “In many ways, you were ahead of the pack.” He also recalled that I had “a sophisticated sense of humor,” and I actually remember him saying that to me one summer. It had come up after I stormed out of shop class in tears over frustration with the project that I had been working on (that summer, 1993, it was a moose puppet). At the time, I also vented about how I felt my parents didn’t appreciate my sense of humor, dismissing it as “immature” and “inappropriate.” As someone who felt different and “defective” for myriad reasons, that was something that I really needed to hear.
During my childhood, most adults labeled me immature based on neurotypical standards that I simply was not hardwired to meet: missing social cues, having interests that were deemed “age inappropriate,” having a strange sense of humor, lack of interest in dating, and not wanting to dress feminine. Mr. Paul was one of the few exceptions to this. Years later, I began to feel frustration at the arbitrariness of how maturity is judged— so often based on conformity and social skills. It’s rarely, if ever, based on any type of intellectual or creative drives.
I should note that I did not come to this conclusion with 20/20 hindsight in adulthood; I was seventeen years old when I first considered this.
I continued to think about this well into my twenties and beyond, including in the summer of 2009, when I was working at an overnight camp in the Poconos that happened to have a wood shop program. During shop, a girl who was about eleven or twelve told me that she wanted to make a birdhouse like the sample we had on display. I was about to say something like, “Oh, that’s great! Yeah, I can help you with that,” but immediately she said, "Never mind. It's too hard." Although I didn’t show it, I felt disheartened that a kid would announce that she wanted to make something, and yet would give up before even trying it. It also saddened me that this sort of attitude was often accepted by adults as normal among kids her age. Because it’s typical, nobody gives it much thought, much less calls it immature or even “sad.” Conversely, when I was a kid, while my parents and other adults praised me when I attempted ambitious projects, words and phrases like “mature” and “ahead of the pack” were rarely used. Rather, I was often called “immature” for blowing up if I ran into a frustrating situation. Furthermore, nobody ever labeled it “mature” when I returned to the task after recovering from a meltdown, willing to risk similarly intense frustration again. To my knowledge, nobody ever said, “Wow, she must really be invested in this project if she thinks it’s worth all of that repeated frustration!”
Autistic kids are given enough grief for struggles that are largely beyond their control— “reading the room,” meltdowns, and so forth— and are dismissed as immature. Not only is it ableist, it leaves a kid feeling deep shame (at least, that’s how I felt). We need to start judging maturity in ways that don’t have to do with social conformity. If relevant, why not praise their intellectual maturity and single-minded focus that enables them to finish what they started, even if it means a meltdown— or several— along the way? Or better yet, why do we even need words like “mature?” Can’t we just praise kids for things that they do well instead of comparing them to everyone else?