The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.

Judith Martin (best known as the etiquette columnist “Miss Manners”) uses a deliberately provocative, comic overstatement to critique the modern social category of “the teenager.” The quip suggests that once society grants a recognized stage of semi-independence—adult freedoms like late nights without adult obligations like taxes—people will try to prolong it, encouraging immaturity and delaying full civic responsibility. Beneath the joke is a conservative cultural observation: that “teenagehood” is less a biological inevitability than a social invention shaped by schooling, consumer culture, and permissive norms, and that naming it can entrench it.