Describe the characteristics of your age identity and how it has changed over time

What factors led to these changes?

Age, when thought of strictly as the number of years you've been alive, is an important identity for everyone. But your age identity is a combination of how you feel about your age as well as what others understand that age to mean. How old is "old"? How young is "young"? Have you noticed how your own notions of age have changed over the years? When you were in first grade, did high school students seem old to you? Although age is a relative term, so are the categories we use for age groups. Today, for example, we use the terms teenager, senior citizen, adult, and minor, but these terms have meaning only within our social and legal system. For example, the voting age is eighteen, but people have to wait until they are twenty-one to buy liquor. Someone who commits a heinous crime can be charged as an adult, even if he or she is not yet eighteen. Still, whether a person feels like an adult goes beyond what the law decrees and comes from some set of factors that is far more complex.