Being told to ‘act your age’ is something you might hear a lot. “Stop acting like a sixth grader.” That is what my wife used to say to me. When I became a teacher of students who were eleven- and twelve-year-old, I was fifty years old. It was like experiencing the youth that I missed. I spent eight hours a day with little contact with adults.

When you’re told to act your age, the actual definition of that is ‘to behave in a manner appropriate to someone of one’s age and not to someone younger or older.’ There is a lot of societal pressure on people to act how they have seen other people their age act.

It can be difficult to understand why someone may not be acting as mature as perhaps they should be, or why a child is mature and wise beyond their years. I once taught a student who had lived in the streets for over a year. Her mother had died and her father was in prison. Her older siblings did not have parenting skills.

In Paul’s first letter to Timothy, he exhorts him in this way: “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). The old mentor wrote to his young protégé to encourage him to display a maturity beyond his years.

There are other reasons why someone may act in a childlike state or seem more mature than their age. Reasons for reverting back to childhood could relate to serious traumatic events where they revert back to acting like a child as a form of defense and protection.  

Everyone is different and different people mature at different rates and stages. It is thought that girls typically mature quicker than boys, and even then, there are girls that may seem less mature than boys.  In real life there are no ironclad norms.

Not acting your age isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless caused by trauma. If you’ve been through a traumatic event, you may find it helpful to go to a professional therapist in order to work through this trauma and work through your feelings so that you can heal.