Growing Up At 18 VS Growing Up At 18
Let me tell you about the day my son turned 18 in London and I realised I had successfully raised what my mother would diplomatically call ‘a coconut’ - brown on the outside, white on the inside, and completely alien to the concept that adulthood is a community project requiring minimum fifteen opinions from relatives you see twice a year.
India 18: The Village Raises the Child (Whether the Child Likes It or Not)
In India, turning 18 isn't just a birthday - it's a cultural intervention disguised as celebration. The moment your child hits this magical number, they become everyone's business. Your neighbour's cousin's friend who works in IT will suddenly have strong opinions about your son's career trajectory. The man who sells vegetables outside your building will ask pointed questions about engineering entrance exam preparation. Even the building watchman develops theories about which coaching classes produce the most successful doctors.
I remember my own 18th birthday back in the day. My aunt arrived with a folder - an actual, physical folder - containing printouts of engineering college brochures, complete with highlighted admission criteria and her personal commentary written in red ink. My mother's friend brought a list of ‘good families’ whose children were also preparing for competitive exams, because apparently studying is more effective when done in groups of similarly traumatised teenagers.
The beautiful thing about India's approach to adulthood is its complete rejection of the Western notion that growing up is a private journey of self-discovery. Privacy? What a delightfully selfish concept. Here, planning your kid's future becomes a group activity where everyone gets to vote, even if their last successful life decision was choosing between Maggi and Top Ramen for dinner.
London 18: Where Birthdays Go to Die Quietly
My son's 18th birthday in London was so unremarkable I actually forgot it was happening until he casually mentioned he could now legally buy wine. Which he didn't, obviously, because he was too busy discovering some new Netflix series about people making terrible romantic choices. The boy treated this massive life milestone with about as much excitement as renewing his Oyster card.
Nobody called. Nobody showed up with advice. Nobody even pretended to care that he'd reached official adulthood. No relatives materialised with career guidance. No aunties called to discuss his ‘settling down’ timeline. The postman didn't suddenly develop opinions about his university choices. After years of conditioning that 18 should come with fanfare and unsolicited life coaching, it felt almost rude that his teachers continued to treat him exactly the same.
What is particularly unnerving for me about London's approach is how it assumes teenagers are capable of making their own decisions. Wild concept, I know. The system here seems to believe that 18-year-olds might actually know themselves better than distant relatives who last saw them when they were twelve and couldn't pronounce ‘engineering’ correctly.
The Great Independence Experiment
The most jarring difference is the concept of privacy as a default rather than a privilege you have to fight for. In India, privacy at 18 means closing your bedroom door and hoping nobody interprets this as antisocial behaviour requiring immediate intervention. Here, my son's privacy is so well-protected that sometimes I wonder if he's actually still living in our house or if it’s just his aura playing hide and seek.
He books his own dentist appointments without me having to remind him seventeen times, opens his own bank account, and can actually talk to his teachers about coursework without me hovering nearby making helpful hand gestures. Meanwhile, I'm standing there like a spare part, occasionally useful for carrying heavy bags but largely redundant to his daily existence.
The weirdest bit? He's figured out stuff I'm still struggling with. Like how the NHS booking system actually works, or why his student loan application needs forty-seven different forms. He deals with college admin like it's perfectly normal to wait three weeks for someone to answer an email about course enrolment, while I'm still the person who gets flustered when the self-checkout machine asks if I want a receipt. I swear these kids have been programmed to expect nothing from any system ever, so they're never disappointed when everything takes forever and makes no sense.
Two Versions of the Same Kid
What's fascinating is imagining how the same child would be developing in India versus London. India version would be surrounded by a chorus of voices offering career advice, marriage timelines, and general life commentary. He'd probably be more connected to extended family networks, more aware of social expectations, and significantly better at navigating complex family dynamics.
London version gets to experiment with identity without a committee reviewing his choices. He gets to mess up without having to hear about how his cousin's friend's brother made the exact same mistake in 1987 and look how that turned out. Nobody's warning him about dangers that may or may not exist based on someone's neighbour's unfortunate experience with choosing the wrong A-levels.
Same kid, same age, but in India he'd be getting advice from everyone who's ever met an 18-year-old, while here he's basically winging it with Google and YouTube tutorials. Neither approach is inherently better - they're just different operating systems for the same hardware.
The Parental Identity Crisis
The real culture shock isn't watching my son grow up differently than I did - it's discovering that I have no idea how to parent an 18-year-old who doesn't need me to advocate for him in every official interaction. In India, I would still be his primary interface with the adult world. Here, I'm basically the human equivalent of a spare tyre - useful in emergencies, otherwise sitting around collecting dust.
It's weird being this irrelevant to someone's daily life, but also kind of brilliant because I don't have to explain his career choices to my mother's yoga class or pretend I understand why he's taking sociology when everyone knows engineering pays better. Terrifying because the silence makes me wonder if I'm missing crucial parenting opportunities or if this hands-off approach will produce a functional adult or a beautiful disaster.
The Beautiful Contradiction of Being Nobody's Project
What kills me is watching him exist without being anyone's improvement project. Here, he just… exists. Makes his own terrible decisions. Learns from his own spectacular failures. Revolutionary stuff, really.
The weird part is how he's turned out more Indian than I expected and less Indian than my mother fears. He'll argue with me about Bollywood movies with the passion of someone who actually cares about cinema, then disappear for three days without feeling obligated to provide a detailed itinerary. He'll watch three hours of Bollywood movies with me and argue about the plot like his life depends on it, then completely blank on calling his grandmother for Diwali. The boy has developed selective cultural memory - keeps the fun stuff, conveniently forgets the obligatory phone calls.
And honestly? Sometimes I miss having everyone stick their nose into my business. At least in India, when I had no clue what I was doing, there were always five aunties ready to tell me exactly where I'd gone wrong and how their neighbour's sister-in-law handled the same situation much better. But then my son handles some administrative nightmare with the efficiency of someone who's never been told he can't do something, and I think maybe this hands-off approach wasn't complete madness after all.
The truth is, I have no idea if we've raised a well-adjusted adult or just created a very functional disaster who's good at hiding his problems. But he still finds my terrible jokes funny and occasionally asks for advice about things that actually matter, so either we got lucky or London's approach to letting kids figure things out actually works. Time will tell, though I'm fairly certain my mother will have opinions about the results regardless.
