We now have a new board for young adults (25 and below). The access to the board is driven by the "Age" dropdown selection box that is presented at signup, and can be altered at any stage in your personal details.
In order to make this work, I had to change some of the existing age bands. Your age may now be incorrect if this affects you. Or if you've been here for a while, your age may now be incorrect anyway!
Old -------------> New
0-10 -----------> 0-12
11-20 ---------> 13-25. This is the only age band that has access to the "25 and under" forum.
21-30 ---------> 26-30
All others remain unchanged.
The inclusion of people down to 13 as "young adults" is not in any way a statement about marriage ages, this ministry has always taken a very strong stance against underage marriage. Rather, it's simply a practical issue - if I added extra categories I risked changing everybody's age, rather than just people below 30, so this was least disruptive. And I have included people down to age 13 in this age bracket for several other reasons:
In order to make this work, I had to change some of the existing age bands. Your age may now be incorrect if this affects you. Or if you've been here for a while, your age may now be incorrect anyway!
Old -------------> New
0-10 -----------> 0-12
11-20 ---------> 13-25. This is the only age band that has access to the "25 and under" forum.
21-30 ---------> 26-30
All others remain unchanged.
The inclusion of people down to 13 as "young adults" is not in any way a statement about marriage ages, this ministry has always taken a very strong stance against underage marriage. Rather, it's simply a practical issue - if I added extra categories I risked changing everybody's age, rather than just people below 30, so this was least disruptive. And I have included people down to age 13 in this age bracket for several other reasons:
- To recognise that many of us wish to encourage our children to strive to greater maturity from a younger age, so I would like to show respect to them by treating them as young adults here
- To include virtually everyone who has gone through puberty and will be dealing with the desires that result from that.
- To include virtually every young person who might (rightly or wrongly) be considering marriage and wish to speak to their peers about the issues they face. It would be impossible to set a break at "legal marriage age" as this is an international forum and the legal marriage age varies enormously around the world, so attempting to set that may cut out some people who could benefit from the support of this group. 13-25 is broad enough to include everyone of legal marriage age almost everywhere except a handful of Islamic countries and some US states which allow younger marriage in exceptional circumstances.
- To align it with the common policy among websites to officially restrict access to people below 13 (this lets me use the bottom age band for other purposes).
- In practice there will be virtually nobody on the site under around 16 anyway, so they don't need a separate category
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