Cognitive maturation refers to the biological development of the brain by which an individual’s thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving abilities evolve and become more sophisticated as they grow older. This process is marked by significant changes in how individuals understand abstract concepts, engage in formal operational thinking, and apply reasoning skills to complex situations. A cognitively immature human contributes to – through their attitudes, behaviours, dealings, responses and languages – a poor ability to plan and make rational decisions, poor problem-solving and information processing abilities, risk-taking behaviours, showing less impulse control, more susceptibility to negative influences and adopting peer pressure.
The definition of a child needs to be amended by eliminating the chronological age threshold and incorporating the biological mental age and cognitive maturation age thresholds.
Studies have revealed that the human’s cognitive development through the learning process continues throughout life and generally undergoes maturational change up to the age of mid to late twenties, an age range typically considered adult rather than child or adolescent. The period for attaining cognitive maturity can vary to a large degree for every human, depending upon one’s nature (biology) of developing cognitive maturity in life and experiences faced by an individual during childhood and adolescence. The cognitive maturity development process can be affected by many complex environmental and biological factors like adverse childhood experiences in the form of abuse, neglect and exploitation, stress, traumatic brain injury, substance or alcohol use, pubertal hormones, genetics including psychological and psychiatric disorders etc., and produce gender-specific implications. A human being who experiences any one or more of the underscored environmental or biological factors during childhood and adolescence may take longer time than others to develop cognitive maturity in their lifetime. Thus, the process of development of biological cognitive maturity in human beings does not specify an exact age at which cognitive maturity is definitively reached at an individual level. The inter-individual variation in the timescale for the development of biological cognitive maturity is yet to be fully identified under the relevant field.
Biological Mental Age is a psychological concept that measures an individual’s biological cognitive maturity and ability compared to the average abilities demonstrated by others of the same chronological age. It represents the typical biological age of the brain at which most individuals demonstrate a comparable level of intellectual functioning. Every human has a biological mental age, which is not necessarily their chronological age. For example, a person who is chronologically 20 years old may have a biological mental age of fewer than 15 years, or a person who is chronologically 15 years old may have a biological mental age of more than 20 years. Exact biological mental age may be assessed under the interdisciplinary field of cognitive and brain science with contributors from various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of mind computer science etc. Normally, psychologists assess the biological mental age by applying various psychological tests including their live assessments of one’s attitude, behaviour, emotion and intelligence. The standardized psychological tests to determine the biological mental age are intelligence quotient (IQ) test, emotional/social/adversity intelligence tests etc. Each test results provide its findings in the form of thresholds on cognitive abilities and can be used aggregately to determine the biological mental age of cognitively mature and immature human beings.
Normally, a child due to their tender age, innocence, and lack of rational understanding is assumed as a cognitively immature human being. The internationally accepted definition of a child is ‘every human being below the age of eighteen years.’ This definition emphasizes the chronological age of a human being since birth but pays no consideration to the biological mental age and cognitive maturity age of human beings. A child may have attained the biological mental age or cognitive maturity of an adult person and vice-versa. The problematic nature of the definition of a child makes children vulnerable to abuse, neglect and exploitation across the nations.
To address the problem highlighted above, the definition of the child needs to be amended by eliminating the chronological age threshold and incorporating the biological mental age and cognitive maturation age thresholds. Besides, these ages must be assessed by a team of qualified interdisciplinary field cognitive and brain science experts collaboratively. This team inter alia can include the following multidisciplinary experts;
* Psychologist (Cognitive/Developmental/Biological)
* Cognitive Neuroscientist
* Developmental Neurobiologist
* Psychiatrist (Child/Forensic)
* Developmental Paediatrician
* Linguist
* Anthropologist
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Based on the above discussion, I propose the following two new definitions of child as;
1. A child means a human being, whose biological mental age is below the mental age threshold of a cognitively mature human being provided that such age shall be assessed by a multidisciplinary team collaboratively, contains cognitive and brain science field experts.
2. A child means a human being who is below the age of his sufficient biological cognitive maturity, provided that such sufficient cognitive maturity shall be assessed by a multidisciplinary team collaboratively, contains cognitive and brain science field experts.
The writer is an Advocate High Court & Human Rights Activist. He can be reached at [email protected] and tweets @Adv_WajahatAli