Jesús OlivaWe often assume that chronological age reflects emotional maturity and the ability to cope with different situations, but this is not the case: each person lives and experiences different realities, there is no single way of living life in the same way as there is no single point of view, hence mental age and emotional age, among others.
Mental age corresponds to the capacity of each person to understand, express and control their emotions in a healthy and adequate way, or the way in which they relate to other people, in terms of cognitive skills.
Mental age is not related to chronological age, as it focuses on one’s level of emotional and intellectual development.
Mental age can affect one’s maturity in different ways, such as mental health, interpersonal relationships, stress management and decision-making. Improving mental maturity is therefore an ongoing and individual process.
Take, for example, gifted children: they have a mental age that is higher than their chronological age. Mental age is primarily related to intelligence. Chronological age, on the other hand, is simply a measure of the date of birth on a calendar.
Leta Hollingworth understood giftedness as a complex set of psychological issues arising from disparities between mental and chronological age in gifted children, and established that the further the gifted child is from average intelligence by chronological age, the greater their adjustment problems . In other words: they are said to be “out of sync” because their emotional, intellectual and physical ages do not coincide, they present an asynchronous development having “different ages” at the same time .
Having the mental maturity of a 14-year-old and the physical maturity of an 8-year-old brings a set of challenges, which are analogous, and which must be faced in the same way. That is why they are vulnerable and why changes in parenting, teaching and counselling are necessary to enable them to develop in the best possible way.
In the words of Annemarie Roper, giftedness is a heightened state of awareness, increased sensitivity and a greater ability to understand and transform stimuli into intellectual and emotional experiences .
Time is of paramount importance in our lives because it influences us in many ways, we have just looked at just one. Do you feel that your chronological age corresponds to your mental age?
📎 Oliva, J. [Jesús]. (2024, 30 July). There is no single age group. PsicoPop. https://www.psicopop.top/en/mental-age/
📖 References:
