If you’ve ever watched a foal stand within an hour of birth or a puppy tumble confidently about within weeks, it’s hard not to wonder: why do humans take so long to grow up?
The short answer is evolution. The longer answer is far more interesting.
Humans are born neurologically unfinished. Compared with many mammals, our brains are remarkably immature at birth. This isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. Our species evolved large, complex brains, but because of the limits of the human pelvis (necessary for walking upright), babies must be born before the brain is fully developed.
That long period of childhood and adolescence allows the brain to wire itself through experience. It gives us time to learn language, culture, cooperation, morality, creativity, and abstract reasoning. While a young zebra must quickly learn to run from predators, a human child must learn how to live in a social world of rules, symbols, and relationships.
Adolescence extends this process even further. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for judgement, impulse control, planning and empathy, continues developing well into the mid-20s. This extended plasticity allows us to adapt to complex societies and changing environments. It’s why humans can invent, reflect, collaborate and innovate at such a high level.
In short, our long journey to adulthood is what makes civilisation possible.
Childhood and adolescence are not simply ‘waiting rooms’ for adulthood. They are periods of intense construction:
• Identity formation – Who am I? Where do I belong?
• Emotional regulation – How do I handle disappointment, anger, attraction, fear?
• Social calibration – How do I negotiate friendship, authority, loyalty and difference?
• Risk learning -What happens when I push limits – and how do I recover?
These skills require real-world practice, safe failure, mentorship and gradual responsibility. They require boredom, play, friction, and embodied experience.
When this developmental window is supported well, young people emerge resilient, empathetic and capable. When it’s distorted or rushed, the effects echo into adulthood.
Is Modern Society Supporting This Process? The short answer is no, or at any rate poorly. Our current environment is evolutionarily novel. The adolescent brain is wired for novelty, reward, peer approval and status sensitivity – precisely the levers that social media platforms amplify. Constant comparison, algorithm-driven validation, and exposure to adult themes compress childhood and heighten anxiety.
Instead of learning social nuance face-to-face, many young people practise identity performance in front of an invisible audience. Mistakes are archived. Status becomes quantified. Attention becomes currency.
At the same time:
• Opportunities for unstructured play have declined.
• Community ties have weakened.
• Academic and social pressures have intensified.
• Sleep –
critical for brain development – is often sacrificed to screens.
None of this means technology is inherently harmful. But it does mean that our developmental timeline, shaped over hundreds of thousands of years, is colliding with systems designed for engagement, not growth.
If long development is our evolutionary superpower, then society should protect it, not compress it.
Young people need:
• Time away from constant evaluation
• Real-world responsibilities scaled to their maturity
• Mentors, not just metrics
• Spaces where mistakes fade rather than fossilise
• Deep attention from adults who model emotional regulation
Our species thrives because we grow slowly. That slowness is not inefficiency, it is the foundation of wisdom, culture and conscience.
The question for modern society is simple. Are we designing environments that honour the slow building of a human mind – or are we asking it to grow up too fast?
School based nurseries are exactly that. They are based in a school. Institutions specifically created for teaching facts and learning specific skills through a designated curriculum. Of course the government will argue that these nurseries will
operate just like any independent provider or childminder. Your child can attend from 9 months of age and receive exactly the same level of care and attention and the same enriched experience. Except they won’t. They can’t in the majority of cases because of building and environmental restrictions. And even if they did emulate the current independent system of provision. How long will that last? Tiny humans handed over to state run establishments.
Am I the only one who finds that a somewhat scary notion?