Summary

Jay Geidd (Head of Child Psychiatry at America's National Institute of Mental Health), who wrote an important article on adolescent maturity some years ago said "Behaviour in adolescence, and across the lifespan, is a function of multiple interactive influences including experience, parenting, socioeconomic status, individual agency and self-efficacy, nutrition, culture, psychological well being, the physical and built environments, and social relationships and interactions".

It would be interesting to think that at 19 or 20 all the tumult is over, but it is becoming increasingly clear that brain maturation extends well into a person's twenties and that future research will give us more questions as well as some answers.