According to an article in New Scientist, the transition from adolescence to adulthood has no clear end point, but new research suggests that sleep habits may give it away
At what point does adolescence end? Perhaps at the point when we start to go to bed progressively earlier rather than later and later.
The end of puberty, or sexual maturation, is well defined. It is the point when bones stop growing, at around age 16 for girls and 17.5 for boys. But for adolescence, the transition from childhood to adulthood, there is no clear endpoint.
"I don't know of any markers for it," says Till Roenneberg of the Centre for Chronobiology at the University of Munich in Germany. "Everyone talks about it but no one knows when adolescence ends. It is seen as a mixed bag of physical, psychological and sociological factors."
His suggestion is based on a study of the sleep habits of 25,000 individuals of all ages in Switzerland and Germany. The study looked at when people go to sleep during vacations.
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