MATURITY? IT'S ON THE SIPP PRINCIPLE.

How many times do you hear people tell others to "Grow up?" Ultimately, it can and frequently is, intended as a put down. But how many people can actually judge maturity?

When I was in Year Three at school, my teacher wrote on my report card, "Peter lacks the physical maturity to cope with things involving his hands, e.g. handwriting, art, sport. However, his ability to remember general knowledge is advanced." Well, was my teacher right? I started school two weeks after my fifth birthday, and it was at the beginning of the year. (This was in the Southern Hemisphere, and I know that in Japan the school year runs from April to March and in the UK and the USA, typically from August/September until May/June/July. I know in Japan, the summer holiday begins in mid to late July and runs until September, in the USA, they have a long summer holiday with a couple of days to a week at Christmas New Year and in the UK, they have half term holidays at various points.) When I started school, you could turn five before March 1, so you could start school age 4, but five years later, it was changed to December 31 of the previous year, so if I had been five years younger, they would have said, "No, he can start school next year," and I would have started age 6. My teacher implied, but did not specifically state, "Peter is, in some cases, up to one to one and a half years younger than his peers." (Back then, with different starting ages, some kids who transferred from Victoria, where they started a bit older, had to go back a year, and because you had six years of primary school in Victoria compared to seven in Queensland, some kids who came up in Year Seven had to revert to primary school in Queensland). What they didn't know, at the time, was, "Peter is autistic, so he has trouble with some activities." My Year Two teacher noticed it and suggested I get checked out, and my mother was told by a neurologist that I had muscular dystrophy and wouldn't live to be 12. Well, considering I'm nearly 45, that diagnosis was wrong.

Fast forward eight years, and we have another teacher who said that I had difficulty relating on the same level as other kids. Well, yes, I did. The best analogy I can give for this is not the ugly duckling but a chicken egg put amongst them. A cygnet grows to be a swan and swans and ducks are both amphibious birds, while a chicken cannot swim. I may have LOOKED like any other teenager, but I didn't ACT like other teenagers. I wasn't into skateboarding, I didn't dress like a favourite pop star, nor did I get my haircut like a famous pop star. Yes, I liked some music, but I didn't write the names of bands or singers I liked on my schoolbag. I was more compliant with school rules than kids I attended school with (the school was quite strict regarding the uniform and we had been told, you either wear your dress uniform or your sports uniform, you do not mix and match, yet some did. Also, with our uniform, the Student Council made the case with the P&C (PTA in the USA) to change the sports uniform from a V-neck t-shirt to a polo shirt and to allow us to wear sweatpants in winter. The sweatpants had elastic cuffs. The Year Co-Ordinator, who was our teacher for one subject, used to allow us a whinge session, and some people complained to him about the Deputy Principal saying that we weren't supposed to roll the cuffs of our sweatpants up and I said that they could wear their own sweatpants however they wanted, just not to school, and when I told my mother this, I thought the teacher was ridiculing me, but he was ridiculing them, by saying, "Oh, but you've got to look good at school, too."

Maturity is divided and assessed across four criteria, social maturity, intellectual maturity, physical maturity and psychological maturity and maturity is elastic. I tended to get on better with people older than me, hence I got on better with my teachers than my peers, I was involved in different things to my peers (those who rubbish Greta Thunberg need to learn about autism), physical maturity, for example, facial and body hair, depth of voice, growing breasts and the like and maturity of thought. So a person may be 17 physically, 25 intellectually, 15 socially and 21 psychologically, as an example.