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For those who don’t like hanging out with minors (18+) why so?

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As a minor who has healthy friendships with people in there twenty’s am aware that there friends aren’t comfortable with hanging out with minors and out of curiosity am wondering why???  Is it afraid of talking about certain subject around them?? How mentally undeveloped minors are? How they act? Am very curious to see reasons 

zwani.com myspace graphic comments

i got on really well with this guy who was 19 when i was 15, but when i told him my age, he said that other people would perceive our friendship as being weird. he had no problem with it, but with adult/ minor relationships (not romantic) being so stigmatized (for a valid reason), it’s really hard for a lot of people to accept that minors and adults can be friends without the adult having ulterior motives. idk i think alot of adults are afraid of being seen as weird and want to be careful when it comes to that kinda thing. 

i'll take a potato chip... and eat it!

@ellas autopsy ⊬ this I totally get I had this problem with a friend also and it’s incredibly annoying. I treat them like an aunt and they treat me like a nephew 

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As a minor you are the responsibility of your parents/caregivers and as such any social relationship with you would require keeping parents/caregivers in the loop.

This is a really bad analogy but it's a tiny bit like if I wanted to hang out with someone's pet without them. It'd be a little weird, and the pet is subject to a whole host of circumstances outside their control.

As an adult without children, there's really no reason for me to be hanging out with minors when there's so many other people I can hang out with and build direct relationships.

One objection may be that your parents/caregivers don't need to know, it could be a secret. Secret relationships aren't great for anyone involved, so again, another reason to not engage.

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There's really no reason for an adult to want to be friends with a minor in my eyes unless they're related to family or friends. It's not really a friendship & more of a guardianship.

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@Nebulana I understand 

zwani.com myspace graphic comments

it's probably the difference of mental maturity and amount of life experience. a few things can still be bonded over like interests and such, but not much more than that. when I was 14 I was friends with a 10 y/o, but starting from when I was 16-18 we naturally drifted apart simply because they still had more growing up to do while I already did

There's not much in common unless there's a shared hobby, & then the interaction pretty much just ends up being about the hobby. I can't relate the way that my childhood was to the way that things are now... I don't even know what most of their memes mean. I'm not going to be rude to kids if they end up in a public space near me or anything, but I'm not their friend & there's no reason for me to maintain conversation beyond whatever basic politeness requires for the situation.

I think most people get into that mindset before 20 since there's such a huge experience gap between being in high school versus college/work. I would caution minors to at least be extremely careful about anyone who's old enough to have graduated high school & seems interested in starting a close personal friendship, if not avoid them entirely.

@Gengar this i do understand there is ever so many things you can discuss with a minor, but i am thankful that people try and be polite with minors instead of clowning on them for simply existing 

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I'm 30, it's weird, I don't relate to them and find them annoying 

@Mitchy

real

Gengar wrote:
There's not much in common unless there's a shared hobby, & then the interaction pretty much just ends up being about the hobby.


This, I'm glad to discuss hobbies, etc in public, but beyond that, I just don't see how it's possible to connect on a personal level with someone in such a wildly different phase of their life.

"The future is not determined by a throw of the dice, it is determined by the conscious decisions of you and me."



If we talking strictly real life, back when i lived elsewhere and had more friends etc, it wasnt an issue at the time. course the culture seamed different in my part of california from the rest of the usa and probably some europeans. 

but we would be 15+ ourselves and smoke weed with our friends older family members, moms if they smoked, often we were how parents got their stuff etc. 
when we were in our early 20s, 25 lower, most of our friend group was yeah around the same age but we had homies that were 15-17 sometimes even 14 if we knew they were from a loose moral family enough their parents wouldnt cause a stink,
usually so much so we been to their house to hang out and probably got high in the garage or soemthing. 
and sometimes they would be over our place for lil kick it parties of the tight knit homies.
but bigger gatherings were generally excluded to prevent issues. 

This was all the myspace era though, i suppose thats different times now, and we were you know, poor/working class cali desert town stoner bros. 

Age wasnt a hangup and generally we even got high with their moms. 
( i dont mention dads much because most of us like. didnt have one lol). 

I don't like having to walk around egg shells while talking to someone. While I grew up being friends with a group of responsible adults who are still my friends as I became an adult, I don't have the patience they have to deal with children especially since 99% of them are the same level of obnoxious(I was in that 99% as a kid, no clue how these guys kept up with my bs)

While I don't mind playing games with kids or hanging out with them in environments where we naturally converse like an in game chat where we're in the same team or something, I would not go out of my way to befriend a kid since you dont know how annoying they will be and I simply dont want to deal with that.

Also I find it increasingly infuriating when children inevitably act stubborn about a bad habit and refuse to take advice. While I know it's a part of life that they're gonna be fucking idiots and learn from their mistakes, it still annoys me seeing people walk into dumb decisions despite warnings. 

So yeah for most people it boils down to

  • lack of relatability
  • not wanting friends they need to watch their words around
  • rightfully not having the patience for most

I let 18 year olds add me cause i want  fresh thoughts. but irl i dont hang out with anyone like 3 years younger than me, cant relate. cant relate so much is unbearable lol.

On FR though? cause i dont want to worry about what im posting or what im saying, this is myy safe space. I dont want to cuss around kids or say anything gross around them. I also dont want to teach, i dont want to teach someone why something is bad or who this old celebrity/meme is or what they shouldn't or should be in to. 

Yeah, um, I'm sorry, minors, but you're minors.  Usually minors are doing minor things. And my interests are grown man interests. I don't do kids' things. I'm a grown man. I can't relate. It's weird. For a 51-year-old man to be hanging out with some teenagers. I mean, for example, what if I went over to a person's house who was also 50 years old, and I walked into his living room, a grown 50-year-old man, and he has a bunch of teenagers in there that aren't his children or his children's friends. I'd be like, okay, what do we have, a church meeting? No. These guys just hang out. I'm like, okay. I wouldn't hang out there. Something's going on. Grown adults that hang out with children, something's going on. It's not normal. Some say they're really mature for their age, yeah I don't know about that.  Some people don't do this but if you're grown, you have to leave these childhood things behind to become a grown person. And if you're a grown person, and you're doing all these children things, and you can only relate to children, I think there's something going on there. Can't put my finger on it. Not trying to blame anybody for anything, but warning. There's a reason that you're feeling these warning signs, and it's understandable that kids don't see them. That's why there's laws that the grown people put in to protect the children, because the children's like, What? I can do it, and the grown people were like, No, some people are dangerous, and you should be careful. I mean, I appreciate kids, but what are they going to tell me? Like a novel way to pay my mortgage?  I mean, honestly. And I personally, I don't have a filter, and you're responsible what you tell children. You're responsible for that. Your words. You can't tell kids stuff. I don't have any filter. I don't want to be responsible for discouraging anybody's future. There's just some hardcore business, dude, that you're dealing with when you're 20 years old that you wouldn't tell a 12-year-old. And when you're 27, there's even more hardcore business that you wouldn't tell a 19-year-old. And when you're 35,etc...  Just don't discourage. So it's just that, and then sometimes minors want advice. They want a priest, a dad, or a psychiatrist or something, and they just constantly asking questions. It's like, it's good. I mean, you're looking for new ideas. Minors don't have any. I mean, they do have some, but dude, I need grown man ideas. I don't need children ideas. There's nothing wrong with minors. They're cool. They just need to figure out their life, and then they can come talk to me. It's hard to talk to someone who hasn't figured out what they're up to, or not up to, these days. I'm not trying to be rude. It's an age thing, straight up, and I think that's what we're talking about.

I somewhat dislike the recurring sentiment/implication I keep seeing that the only possible circumstance in which someone above the arbitrary threshold of 18 would only ever want to even be around someone below the arbitrary threshold of 18 is if they secretly wanted to violently rape them, and otherwise there is absolutely no reason or shared interests or commonalities between the two as humans that exist, presumably speak the same language, use the internet, and presumably have similar hobbies, had a similar upbringing, frequent similar spaces on the internet, or that interactions are somehow not valuable if they're only about a shared hobby, or that hobbies are somehow segregated by age even though this historically makes no sense.
Being "weird" is the ultimate sin in the eyes of the Failed Normalfag. The Failed Normalfag would love to accuse you outright, but since you haven't done anything wrong, they simply pin you with the crime of "not *being normal (*exactly like them/bending to their arbitrary standard of morality)", which is often treated as worse on the modern internet for some reason.

Back in the olden days of Before 2020, it was somewhat understood that having an older mentor figure was an important part of socialization for someone younger, as having an older person to talk to that wasn't in a position of authority could allow the younger person to confide in someone that wouldn't potentially punish them for beginning to question the rules that their parents laid out for them (an example being, imagine a kid raised in a strict religious household and beginning to question their faith; this kid would likely benefit from having an older person to confide in who's not directly related to their family and ideally isn't a teacher or a therapist.)
Not without its risks, obviously, but the vast majority of adults aren't child rapists, we used to be a more trusting society that didn't constantly beat into everyone's heads that everyone else is a potential threat.

Anecdotally speaking, I largely had positive experiences being younger online and mostly being around people older than me, bonding over shared tastes in video games and similar upbringings; having people older than me who were into these things was comforting, since as a kid, my family was constantly trying to convince me that my hobbies were for children, and even tried to bully me out of them, but I suppose I'm an outlier here.
The thought of befriending someone younger than me doesn't bother me on its own, but since everyone's trying to be more morally puritan than each other all the time now, even having a normal friendship is damning, so I refrain.
The culture also just feels too different now, everyone younger than me (and not even, since people well into their 20s and even people that're the same age or older than me also act like this, but it generally seems to get worse the younger you go) is really annoying all of the time, incapable of holding a proper conversation very long without being ingenuine, or falling back on memes or internet lingo, or being so uncomfortable with long periods of silence that they just start spamming shit that's difficult to respond to. The moral puritanism doesn't help, since even with shared hobbies and interests, one party will inevitably make it clear that "Oh, I like this thing, BUT I don't like the icky parts (everything I don't like is the icky part and I secretly don't like this at all and just want to be seen as cool)"

...but enough of my thinly veiled passive-aggressive reply to half the posts in this thread
It's not that I don't want to, I'd like to think I could be friends with anyone if they're nice enough, and none of this is even issue at all irl, nor was it an issue even 10 years ago, internet culture is just fucking retarded now and most people in general (not just under-18s) are annoying.

I want to pick up this call.

Because I have to deal with very immature and easily offended people. Plus, I like talking to people I can learn from and obviously, there's nothing to learn from minors except how not to act on the internet. 

Maybe MySpace was all the friends we made along the way.

At 63 I have absolutely nothing in common with someone underage who especially has little to no life experience, and I especially refuse to accept ANY friends request from females who are minors. This week alone I have denied 6 who were 16 and younger. 

Idrk, I feel like it isn't rlly my place to be hanging out with kids I met on the internet everyday. Like, wanting life advice and engaging in interests with me is fine; I just remember how I acted around adults when I was younger (I.e. constantly wanting their attention, looking to them as parental figures and over sharing/being kinda inappropriate around them) and maybe I'm projecting, but I don't want to become a child's whole world unless I'm their actual father or smthn. It feels dangerous even if I didn't do anything "wrong".

Similar to what others have said, lack of maturity and not having much to relate to besides hobbies, games or a show. Especially reaching my mid 20s I enjoy talking to people with a lot more life experience. And truthfully, I do not have the patience for teenagers. I agree in the stance that I am automatically a caregiver / parent whenever interacting with a minor online, and with me wanting to remain childless forever, it's a bit uncomfortable having to put on a metaphorical teacher's uniform. 

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