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This chapter explores the legal and social responses to childhood. It explores the contradictory messages that are sent by the law about children. It also considers the importance attached to the concept of “Gillick competence”. The chapter highlights how childhood is seen in distinction from adulthood and the debates around the “goods of childhood”. The concepts of children’s rights and the best interest of the child are explored.

Emily Murphy discusses the film adaptation of Jimmy Liao’s The Starry Starry Night (2009) and Chang Ta-Chun’s children’s book Wild Child (1996) in the light of national social issues in Taiwan, especially the intergenerational conflicts between the young and the old as a result of the radical economic and political developments on the island. While the examples she provides draw upon popular tropes of aging in Western literature, they also subvert these in order to address specific social issues in Taiwan, such as the recent phenomenon of “economically worthless children,” which owes its existence to rapid modernization and competition between economically deprived generations. In the narratives under discussion, bonds between young characters and their grandfathers are troubled by the challenges of modernization. They contribute to ongoing debates about age, particularly the (in)ability and (un)desirability to become adults, as discussed in Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up?

This book’s conclusion reiterates the argument that queer YA is an anxious genre that perpetually rehearses a nervous uncertainty about its own constitution. Mason steps back to consider queer YA’s relationship to children’s literature more broadly, entering the discussion through a concept developed in Beverley Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: the “anxiety of immaturity” that circulates around and within children’s literature and its criticism. Mason revisits the “Great YA Debate” of 2014, which followed a Slate piece by Ruth Graham entitled “Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Young Adult Books.” This debate included high profile pieces by Christopher Beha and A.O. Scott in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, both of which evince a profound ambivalence about whether or not adults should be reading young adult literature. These conversations, Mason concludes, illustrate how young adult literature continues to be an unceasing source of adult anxiety.

Where we introduced this book with Angel’s and Benny’s narratives, we complete the adolescent journey for these teens and others in chapter seven. In this chapter, we examine the different ways that youth prepared for young adulthood. Considering that several teens in this study grew up with chaotic circumstances -- some facing homelessness, multiple foster home placements, and incarceration as teens -- we look at whether supportive and capable adults can intervene in teens’ lives to help them as they prepare for adulthood. Just as gender shaped girls’ and boys’ childhood and teen experiences, transitions out of adolescence differed by gender as the pressures, constraints, and opportunities ranged for girls and boys.

This chapter discusses the three novels in Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis series, published between 1987 and 1989: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). Dawn begins in the aftermath of a nuclear war and follows the story of Lilith, one of the war's few survivors, who has been captured by aliens called the Oankali. Adulthood Rites is the story of Akin, Lilith's only son who is part man part alien. Imago extends the narrative of Lilith's family into the unexpected arrival of a human-ooloi construct child, Jodahs. In all three books, Butler provides examples of how genetics work: the cancer gene that Lilith and others carry, Tate's Huntington's disease, and the neurofibromatosis of the reproducing humans encountered by Jodahs. This chapter also considers Butler's use of Ronald Reagan as inspiration for Adulthood Rites, her views on nuclear war as expressed in Dawn, and her attitude regarding utopian science fiction.

Heidegger defines the “They” as humanity in its commonplace attitude towards death: death is always inferred (rather than directly faced), always deferred. But Limon's reading of Heller's Catch-22 demonstrates that conceiving of death immediately and immanently is actually the easier exercise: if it is always here, it can always be confronted and withstood; it is deferred, always awaiting, anti-heroic death that is terrifying. The central paradigm of anti-heroic death appears in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: death is imagined at the end of an inexplicable journey to Moriah. When (as Kierkegaard revises the story) God fails to save Isaac, he offers him eternal life but fails to offer him a return to childhood (since the one impossible reward for knowledge of death is innocence of it): thus adulthood becomes the key concept for conceiving the deferred death of the “They.”

The introduction argues that the marriage of minors has always been relatively common in the United States, though explanations for its prevalence vary over time. In earlier eras children married because childhood was not strictly demarcated from adulthood; in later eras, Americans’ discomfort with adolescent sexuality has allowed many to countenance youthful marriage. While there are real instances of exploitation to be found in minors’ marriages, paradoxically many youth also found marriage one of the few ways to achieve adulthood prematurely, emancipating themselves from their parents and legally protecting sex with older spouses. The introduction also explains terminology, methods, and sources.

Following World War II, the age of first marriage dipped to an all-century low. Numbers of teen brides and grooms soared through the early 1960s, and then quickly dissipated. While early marriage fit right into a United States bent on fighting the Cold War with domestic stability at home, experts, journalists, and academics also bemoaned the large numbers of high school students who married in these decades. This chapter argues that the uptick in early marriage, especially among white urban and suburban dwellers, was caused by conflicting messages about sex, which resulted in premarital pregnancies and shotgun weddings; a nationwide emphasis on domesticity; and by cravings by teenagers for adulthood, symbolized through marriage. While rates of early marriage for rural and nonwhite residents remained steady, the real change here was a white middle-class early marriage surge, which is what resulted in all the expert hand-wringing.