In many ancient societies, teenagers were married off in their teen years. In some of them, this is when hunting or knighthood training started.
Each of these are rites of passage into adulthood. All line up with puberty, or at least the later stages thereof. All point to the same conclusion; like a country drawing its borders at a natural boundary like a river or mountain range, puberty and adulthood were one of a kind for much of history, making modern western society's arbitrary several-year age gap between the end of puberty and the start of adulthood abnormal and unprecedented, and frankly, making one wonder what agenda drove it in the first place.
One prime suspect for this is the imposing of older generations' views on the young. Of all the public services, few seem as innately coercive as K-12 education. Welfare draws from the till of tax dollars taken from everyone else, but leaves up to the individual recipient whether or not to accept it, or how to spend it. (To a point, depending on the jurisdiction.) Firefighting draws from the till; but draws fewer dollars per capita, and doesn't require thousands of hours of teenagers' lives. Cops and soldiers have a lawful level of authority over everyone else, but that's necessary to maintain order. Education imposes upon an entire generation any set of assumptions about our world baked into the curriculum to cater to the whims of any majority of voters; most of whom are, incidentally, not teenagers. (And most teenagers, for that matter, aren't old enough to vote.) So while these teenagers will be old enough to vote, they will be doing so after several' years worth of indoctrination; well into adulthood; in the previous generations' assumptions about the world.
While the idea that an (actual) child might not have had as much need for independence; or more need for a lack thereof; may have appealed to our ancestors, the notion of extending this into teen years seems to be a parasitic theft of an otherwise more reasonable instinct. I don't think it's a coincidence that in the process, they've so blurred the distinction between adult and child that many other adults are now living at home, years into what even today's laws would count as adulthood. But do the rest of us really have any room to speak, after arbitrary extending childhood's natural borders beyond that river?
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