Scholars Mind

Stuck Between Kid and Adult

“I just can’t wait to be king,” complains Simba. He is not quite one thing, not quite another. Not everyone is the heir to the throne, but we do all spend time as teenagers, no longer children but not yet adults. Are there advantages to life in the in-between? Would it be better if we transitioned more quickly from childhood to adulthood?

Key concepts

Liminality
Standing on a threshold — no longer what you were, not yet what you will be. The anthropologist Victor Turner used it for the middle stage of a ritual, when a person has left one status and not yet been given the next. Adolescence is the clearest civilian case: too old for the children's table, too young for the adults'.

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Every work — at a glance

  • I Just Can't Wait to Be King — Elton John and Tim Rice (song)

    Simba's exuberant number from The Lion King (1994), bossing around the hornbill Zazu and fantasising about a kingdom with 'no one saying do this'. The animation deliberately breaks from the rest of the film's style because the whole sequence is a daydream, not an event.

What to know

  1. 01
    Are there advantages to life in the in-between? Real ones. The threshold is a low-stakes window for experimenting with who you are before adult commitments lock the answer in — so the awkward limbo is doing developmental work that a fast promotion to adulthood would simply skip.

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Across subjects

The in-between is visible in the tissue. The adolescent brain finishes unevenly: the reward and emotion systems come online early and run hot, while the

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Adolescence is years of feeling almost-grown, impatient to start. Advantage, or awkward wait? One side celebrates the freedom and plasticity of a safe rehearsal for adulthood, and notes that shortening it just hands teens adult burdens early. The other sympathises with Simba: a faster transition might spare years of restlessness.

Practice — a sample

SOCIf teenage limbo were instead made a single overnight ceremony, the developmental moratorium would most probably —

  • A Reverse
  • B Lengthen
  • C Stay the same
  • D Double
  • E Disappear

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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