Commons:Categories for discussion/2023/09/Category:Teenagers

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Category:Teenagers

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~~Rename Category:Teenagers to Category:Adolescent children~~ (edit: probably too simplistic approach, more nuance called for, see below) In keeping with the parent category Adolescence and its primary sub-categories (Adolescent boys / Adolescent girls). The primary division for human stages of development is Adult humans / Children but "teenagers" is problematic because it is mainly a children category, but contains two years (18 & 19) of the adult categories. Thus I would propose not a simple category move at first, but instead create two new categories (Adolescent children and Teenage adults) to sort contents into, ultimately making Teenagers into a dab between those two. Alternatively, instead of Teenage adults being created, we could simply move them to Young people (covers 18-40 yo) and do the same process, but I think having the adult teens have their own spot, at least during the transition, would be better. (@Trade: ) Josh (talk) 22:26, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Adolescence and Teenaged have overlap, but are not equivalent. The first is a physiological process. The second, by definition, is numeric, but also has cultural connotations. Age of adolescence can vary (usually but not always starting shortly before teen years and continuing into early teens). By late teens, in many places the people are legally and culturally no longer children but adults. -- Infrogmation of New Orleans (talk) 23:30, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- @Infrogmation: Yes, I know adolescence and teenage are not equivalent, that is exactly the problem. They are currently being mashed together as an intermingled categorization tree and I would like to unmingle it. You say oppose, but what you write seems to indicate they should not be treated as they are now. Since my proposal has a few moving parts, perhaps you can clarify if you think the current mish-mash of adolescent/teenage is really best kept as the mess that it is, or if maybe you have some different ideas on how we can structure things? Josh (talk) 00:03, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment In the table at the right, "adolescent children" is listed, but actual category names are typically "adolescent boys" and "adolescent girls", although "teenage" (in various forms) is used for several categories as well, so no single terminology has been consistently applied. The stage corresponding with 13-17 year-olds, regardless of name, is widely used as a stage of development under Children in most people categories that are sorted by stage of development. Josh (talk) 00:10, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Lean toward keep. I see it way more as a cultural matter than a biological one. The concept of "teenagers" makes sense mainly post-WWII (certainly not earlier than the Victorian era) and also mainly in countries with a certain level of economic development. It involves having a somewhat distinct culture between that of childhood and adulthood. - Jmabel ! talk 01:39, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say keep as is, a person is normally no longer considered a child when they reach adolescence even if some legislation uses the term "child" otherwise. And yes the term "teenager" is a definite age and most people reach adolescence before 13 but some will still be children at 13. Crouch, Swale (talk) 14:49, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Infrogmation, Jmabel, and Crouch, Swale: It is sounding like it makes sense to keep Category:Teenagers. What Crouch is saying is making it sound more like we need a third top level break, instead of just children and adults, we should have children, teens, and adults. Or are Teenagers just an additional parallel track to the 'stage of development' or something else? So I guess maybe the first question to address is, what is Category:Teenagers:

A 'stage of development' to be fit into the structure at right
A 'chronological age' (or group of ages) that overlaps some portions of the 'stage of development' structure, and important to maintain as its own grouping due to (particularly post-WWII) cultural implications.

I would lean towards #2 based on what I am reading here. It seems that it is worth keeping for the reasons above. A couple of follow-on questions:

Should we continue to apply our current bright line dividing all into children (everyone under 18) and adults (everyone 18+)? It seems the word 'children' gives some pause as some do not apply that term to adolescent minors. It's probably why the law doesn't use the term, instead using 'minor' for non-adults. Do we need a third group between children and adults for age grouping? Should we limit the term 'children' to pre-pubescent minors and use a different term for all under 18s as a group?
Some users have mentioned legal definitions around some of these terms. As far as I am aware none of these categories are bound to reflect any given legal system's definitions and we have no categorization of people based on legal status (in the age arena anyway), nor are any age-related categories intended to offer any legal statement one way or the other. So since legal age definitions seem completely irrelevant to our current categorization scheme, but yet people still bring it up, is it something we should care about, and how would we go about doing so if we were to take that into account? I can't see a workable way to do this, but am interested in what you might think.

Josh (talk) 21:29, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A person can reach adolescence at different ages, from what I can remember at school its normally between 8 and 14, if someone reaches puberty at 7 they would technically not be classified as a child but if they hadn't at 15 they technically would still be. I think the concept of "Teenagers" is more useful as its a crisp definition as people won't normally know if someone is a child or not and we can't expect users here to define that. Crouch, Swale (talk) 08:12, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Not proposing a particular solution here, but I've always been uncomfortable with most of the "stages of development" as we've had them. "Babies" for pre-toddlers and "children" for toddlers up to adolescence make sense to me; after that (maybe even there?), these distinctions vary across cultures, and our current approach reflects a Euro-centric industrial and post-industrial culture: very culture-bound and hence era-bound, but it ends up treated as if it were universal.

I'm 68 years old. I don't particularly think of myself as an "old person" (though there are days...). I find it very weird to classify, say, Angele Merkel as an "old woman" or Vladimir Putin as an "old man." Conversely, I'm told that in much of Africa 40 is considered "old". In Jewish law, a boy becomes a man at 13; in the South Sea islands, I gather that it is considered simply normal for both of the leading genders to begin an adult sexual life at puberty. In the U.S., the age of majority is 18 for some purposes, 21 for others. It's really hard to homogenize this sort of thing.

I do think teenagerdom as a cultural phenomenon deserves a category, but with the understanding that (for example) there is no such thing as a 17th-century teenager any more than there is a 19th-century hippie. - Jmabel ! talk 02:25, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oooh... the 'old' person category, I agree I am not enthusiastic about that for one, but in general anything beyond child/adult has been a hard one for me. I don't know who came up with that guideline I put there, but I've only been attempting to live within it as it seemed a pretty established standard for categories. 'Stages of development' do seem to make a bit of sense for children as of course, they are developing. But looking at the articles on the subject, it is not like there is some universal standard (or even generally broad standard) in the world, but just various schemes by academics based on their particular academic focus and what fits with the research they work on.

I think the influence of English-centrism and more broadly Euro-centrism in categories is quite strong, and I think you are right that it gets presumed to be some universal thing. The list at right may not be my creation, but I did add one bit, "as categorized on Wikimedia Commons" because I wanted to highlight that this wasn't some universal standard, but just the way it happens to be currently structured here on Commons.

When you talk about categorizing Merkel or Putin, i.e. categorizing individual person categories, that is also problematic. It is one thing to sort a picture saying the person in the picture is a woman, and put it under Women. But if one sorts a category of Angela Merkel, saying that she is, as of this moment a woman, so her whole category goes under Women sounds fine, but she wasn't always a woman (presumably she was a baby like most of us at one point), and when she announces she has transitioned to a man one day in the future, then what? Does her whole category get moved to Men? I don't know, but I generally stay away from doing this kind of categorization because I am not comfortable with placing people categories under things based on their momentary current state (even if it seems unlikely to change much). Anyway, that's probably too far off on that tangent.

You are right that the concept of a 'teenager' as a group at all is relatively recent. That would indicate it is not really a pure 'chronological age', as a 15-year-old is a 15-year-old no matter where or when they are from, but it seems rather silly to talk about 'Teenagers of the Roman Empire' or something since that would be an utterly irrelevant concept at that place and time. I do think "Teenagers" are a legitimately recognized phenomena.

One additional think I note is that the word teenager is expressly an English-language creation. The concept of covering the 'teen' numbers (13-19) is dependent on how English names those numbers, using unique number words through 12 before transitioning to 'ones-plus-ten' format from 13 on. In Spanish for example, this doesn't make sense, since they number uniquely through 15, and only from 16 on does Spanish use a 'ones-plus-ten' format, so even the linguistic concept of 'teenager' being 13-19 doesn't make sense. "Teenagers" are "adolescentes" in Spanish, but really that is the word for "adolescent" of course, and as we know, the two are not synonyms. So yeah, I complete get that this category, and probably the whole range of age groupings that we have are probably the result to a large degree of English-language and Euro-centrism influence on our structure.

I would actually be okay with binning the entire young/middle-age/old categorization for adults. It has always seemed rather arbitrary at best, and I do not understand how exactly they should be populated. If they really are just a chronological age grouping, then why bother? The chronological categories can do that just fine. I'm not sure why a 39-year-old is better categorized in with 18-year-olds than with 41-year-olds. Also, on what grounds do we determine which group for those we don't know the actual age of, is it just 'oh this one looks old' or what? There are may be distinct developmental traits and mile-stones that identify babies from children for example, but for adults at best there are some general trends and changes that indicate aging, but no bright lines. I know this would be kind of a bold thing to do, but I would say if we know the age, categorize in chronological age categories, but if not, then its just adult, not old/middle/young based on what users think the person looks like. Josh (talk) 04:07, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: No consensus for a change, (and it would be a massive undertaking to do so). --The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 09:15, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]