Are we children?

You may have noticed that I started my last post with "As a kid, between 2% and 90% of my thoughts were consumed with thinking of products..." which would lead one to infer that I am no longer a child. I apologize for being unclear with my wording, because the question of whether or not I am a child is still up in the air.

Not knowing where to begin, I looked up "child" in the dictionary.
child [chahyld] noun 1. a person between birth and full growth.

I would agree that this definition matches conventional views of childhood, but it is in the interpretation and application that we notice discrepancy. I know I'm a person. I'm also pretty sure that I am after birth, but have I reached full growth? What is "full growth?" It's when you're done growing.That means you're stuck being exactly the same as you are now for every day after today, like a machine that makes tubs of lard or something, repeating the same motion again and again, never changing. Full growth does not sound fun to me, because it means I will never learn anything new, never have realizations that change my life or experience any exciting life-changing events.

To illustrate this idea of "full growth," I have included a graph for your convenience. When you are at full growth, ripeness (could also be "maturity" if that helps you conceptualize it, but not being mature means you're immature and I don't want to portray a negative connotation) has reached a  maximum and thus the change in ripeness ("maturation") is zero. As you'll notice, in the green part of the graph, ripeness is increasing at an increasing rate while in the purple part of the graph ripeness is increasing at a decreasing rate. This means that in the green part of the graph, the change in ripeness increases each year while in the purple part of the graph the change in ripeness decreases each year.

 In the past four years, while I may not have changed much in height, I have changed more in other ways than in any other four-year period of my life. (...wow that sounds really sentimental) Four years ago I was a naive high school student that thought a 70 on a Pre-Calc final was the end of the world, was afraid to talk to people unless it was about Harry Potter (although I still love talking about Harry Potter), and  wondered why a wall would shake when two people were together in the room next door. Besides learning to live on my own, I am now a college junior that knows there are more important measures of a person's quality than grades, has the confidence to introduce herself to random individuals just because they look like they might be witty, and still has a lot to learn about the structure of buildings and why the walls would shake so unexpectedly. I anticipate that in the next four years of my life, I will change even more as I learn about the structure of buildings as well as build my life.

So I assert that I am not close to approaching "full growth" because I am still changing at an increasing rate and thus on the green part of the graph. People are dynamic individuals that never stop changing, so full growth is more like an asymptote, and I will never reach full growth. If a child is someone that is between birth and full growth, then a child I will always be.