Not sure why you want to get that way discussing this. Seriously. Come back with a serious argument for or against. My kid and yours are anectodal. Using your kids or mine as examples is a weak argument and frankly unbecoming of what I’ve seen you capable of posting.
Do better.
First off, anybody painting "conservatives" of being partisan on this issue should just be smacked. It's a partisan play by the left to lower it and sure, the conservatives have a partisan interest in not having it lowered... but anyone trying to argue one party is being partisan and another is just being virtuous needs to smack themselves.
So pushing partisanship aside because I just want good governments and policies, I'm against lowering the voting age, I actually might be in favour of raising it. At the end of the day, humans develop differently and there is no one day we can pick, 16th, 17th, 18th, or 25th birthday, that has a nice clean cut-off as "you've now got a reasonably developed adult brain to work with," since some will be there at 18 while others won't reach it until 25, and others will never reach it. That's why it's called the age of
majority in that, for the majority of people will have a reasonably developed brain (of which there is also no objective standard).
I think a lot of that brain development has to do with the responsibilities we give people, a bit of a chicken or the egg game. I know moving out at 18 made me grow up quicker, I know being a Pl Comd at 22 made me grow up quicker. The trend these days is that adolescent youth are taking on less and less of those responsibilities. They are moving out later, entering careers later, it's completely common to have someone's parents calling a professor in post-secondary or dealing with post-secondary administration on issues, etc. Couple that with the evolving scientific literature that says adolescence continues into the mid-20s. There seems to be nothing that suggests that the age of majority should be lowered because "kids these days" are growing up faster / brain development is happening earlier, quite the opposite.
What "benefits" are there, exactly? A higher voting turn-out? How is that a benefit? I would challenge the idea that that in and of itself is a benefit. If higher voter turn-out is an indisputable benefit, then the argument should be about mandatory voting.
Also the whole "well it's their future, they should be able to vote on it," ummmm okay? Then why not start letting 8 year olds vote?
Now, here's a real interesting thought experiment that will probably raise a fuss... female brains tend to develop faster than male brains. How about different ages of majority for boys and girls, with the ladies getting to vote earlier.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
