This is off topic, but
It's too bad "modern" man has become such...
Whatever happened to kids being "kids"... building forts, running in empty fields with their dogs, sling shots, having scuffles, running to Mommy when hurt, trying to kiss a girl or sneak a peek up her dress (you know you tried it...) going days without watching TV cause there was so much to do?
All grown up at 13... what a shame
The "Gee Pop" utopia (something like 1950's middle-class suburban America) never existed outside of Society illustrations. It didn't even exist at the time people think it did.
Pre-history
Girls were paired-off shorly after they were fertile, boys generally had to be enough of a man for a woman to consider pairing with them. Children were expected to take up adult tasks as they were able to perform them; in a hunter-gather society a four-year-old can gather 1/3rd of it's own food.
BC era
Mostly as pre-history, except hunter-gathering mostly died out and primative pastoralism and early agriculture became the norm. Both involved children in work from an early age.
AD era
Mostly as BC era. Church law in Europe set age-of-consent at 12 for girls. Children typically worked with their parents learning their skills from an early age.
Basically, if you look at things from a historical perspective, an average 13-15 year-old female would already be operating as an adult through most of human-kinds history, including sexually and reproductively, with boys maybe being a little later reproductively speaking.
Historically speaking our kids are now freaks. They have an educational level far higher than most adults ever attained 100 years ago at a point where their bodies are flooded with hormones and changing. They live in a society where they are not expected to do what daddy or mummy did, where they will not be considered freakish if they're not married off by 18, where they have their own rights and protections under law. They are physically adult (as in fertile), albeit unmature YEARS before they are regarded as adults, and funnily enough desire goes hand-in-hand with fertiltity, unless you live in a sexually repressive society which we do not, although some try to keep it that way.
We should concentrate on helping these brave new people deal with the world they are actually in, rather than trying to get them to conform to quasi-mythical expectations of a gone era it is now unreasonable to expect them to conform to.
