I recently saw a post which mentioned that there’s a significant difference between “children” and “teenagers” when it comes to what material is appropriate for them to read/watch

and, I don’t exactly disagree– and yet, the place where that wording draws the line? seems… even more arbitrary than most other age cutoffs.

what is the point where a child becomes a “teenager”? Oh, it’s… the point at which the English language starts naming two-digit numbers with a mashup of the word “ten” and the second digit.

not all languages and numerical systems even have that. and the ones that do, don’t all have it in the same place.

if you spoke Spanish it would be sixteen (catorce, quince, dieciseis.) If you spoke Japanese it would be, I guess, ten or eleven (hachi, kyu, ju, ju-ichi) which seems maybe less arbitrary until you realize the decimal system is arbitrarily based on humans having ten fingers, not on anything in particular that happens to us at the age of ten

in English we seem to use teenager and adolescent kinda interchangeably, because I guess the changes that your body goes through in adolescence usually start around the time you become (in English) a teenager

but there totally is a range of times that can happen… and it totally includes the numerical cutoffs of both Spanish and Japanese and then some… so, if you’re talking about something being different for “teenagers” specifically because they’re going through puberty… then I kinda think you should probably say that, instead of “teenager.”