I mean, it’s still set in a mostly medieval world, right? Not to say I’m a huge fan of it either, but that’s not entirely inaccurate for that time period, at least unless I’ve been completely misunderstanding that time period my whole life. Kids were expected to grow up fast back then, life just wasn’t as long for most people, so you sorta have to compress how we consider age now into a smaller space. Grow up faster, grow old faster, and then die as an ancient-looking wrinkly old prune person at the age of sixty.
Or, again, I’ve just completely misremembered medieval life expectancies and I’m talking out my ass, idunno. Here’s hoping it’s not that one, I guess.
This whole debate has a lot of misconceptions thrown around by people. In fact, his argument has been disproved for over 50 years. There was the idea that only the Early Modern world (for those unaware, Early Modern means from around fall of Constantinople to French Revolution) invented childhood and adolescence, first put forth by Philippe Ariès, a French historian of the family and children, in
Centuries of Childhood (1960). But its conclusions and his methods have been heavily and rightly criticized.
According to medieval medical and moral treatises, the stages of childhood began with infancy, which lasted until 2 years of age. Those aged from 2 to 7 were considered to be in a higher stage of infancy. It was only at age 7 that childhood actually began. At this point children could be educated or apprenticed in a trade, but that did
not make them adults. Higher childhood extended from age 12 to 21, and until the age of 21 the child remained under the guardianship of its parents or some other authority. Therefore, real responsibilities,
adult responsibilities were not undertaken until age 21. Members of the clergy, for example, could not take vows until they had reached 21. The same is true for marriage, which was not undertaken at age 13 (John Hajnal, for example, have proven something known as the Western European Marriage Pattern using statistical analysis of Church registers, showing that in Western Europe prior to the modern era, on average women married at about age 23 and men at 26, and marrying at 21 required parental consent).
And you might say "well, this world is clearly modeled on the Early Modern period, looking more 18th century than medieval", and while that is true, it wasn't much different even then. The
Bibliotheca Scholastica (1589) for example offers seven stages of age, explaining each as follows, offering suggested ages for each:
- Infancy, or the age untill seven yeares.
- Childhood or the age from seven to fourteene.
- Youth, or the age from fourteene, to twenty eight.
- Manhood, or the age from twentie eight to fiftie.
- The age from fifty to seventy An elderly man, or one of that age.
- Senior. The age from seventy to death. Extreame oulde age, or the ende of this age.
So yeah, I don't know about non Western European societies (I suspect it is similar), but there was rarely a time where a 10 year old would be considered "near adult" and thus subject to exile for an offense instead of like, putting him on his father's knee and caning him.