Here’s my favorite thing about living with a toddler: watching him make decisions. It is the source of endless fascination and pleasure for me. That tired old cliche “seeing his gears turn”—this is really true with a young child. You can watch their expressions change as they process new information.

And since I’m human and thus every observation I make about someone just makes me think about myself, the thousands of decisions that Milo makes in a day leads me to ponder my own decision-making.

Most of the critical long-term decisions that I’ve made in my life were made in my late teens and early 20s: what college I attended, my major(s), where I lived after college, my first jobs. I even met Matthew when I was 20, although we didn’t start dating until I was 26—lucky for Matthew.

Here’s the thing about your early 20s: You’re an adult by every definition that counts. You can vote; you can drink; most of us have graduated college or trade school and have begun careers. Some of us are married or dating the person we will marry. Some of us even have kids.

But a 21-year-old isn’t even a fully-formed human being yet. The frontal lobe reaches full maturity during your mid-20s. Why is your frontal lobe so important?

The executive functions of the frontal lobes involve the ability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress unacceptable social responses, and determine similarities and differences between things or events. Therefore, it is involved in higher mental functions.

So that’s some pretty important stuff. The underdeveloped frontal lobe is why a lot of us did things in our teens and 20s that seems at best reckless and at worst criminal, or at least criminally stupid.

I was recently laid off from the company for whom I had been working since I was 21. It was the kind of foundation-shaking life occurence that makes you take stock, that makes you look back and wonder how things might have been different if you’d chosen another path.

As a parent, I am really saddened by how much pressure is on teenagers to figure out their entire futures before they’ve even figured out who they are yet. I don’t know yet how I’m going to help Milo through that time in his life, but I do want to make sure that none of that pressure is coming from me. I hope that he screws up, a lot, and learns from all of it. And that he can pick himself up after every setback and shoulder on. I hope that if he learns anything from us, it’s that failure isn’t the worst thing. Giving up is the worst thing.