Children should act, speak, and dress like miniature adults at all times, regardless of age.
It took years for me to fully understand this. I was born into the religion and because my parents were poor immigrants, I had adult responsibilities thrust upon me at a very young age anyway, so I was in many ways an adult by the age of 15.
After leaving the Witnesses as an adult in my mid 20s, it began to dawn on me how cruel it was to expect children to behave like adults during meetings. While most other churches had Sunday school or alternative programs for children, Witnesses expected children to sit like grown adults for 2 hours listening to boring nonsense while wearing a suit and tie. In retrospect it seems like a cruel and bizarre practice.
Aside from it potentially being a product of being a policy written by childless octogenarians in Bethel, I think it's also largely a product of trying to enforce a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Adolescence is a modern concept. It was commonly understood as recently as a century ago that youth ended in mid adolesnce, roughly at 14 or 15 years of age. In Mexico they would celebrate quinceañeras, which was a girl's 15th birthday, a symbol to the outside world that she was now a woman and could be courted for marriage. Both my father and mother were expected to have jobs, and indeed had jobs, before the age of 10.
The Bible was written in an era that was even more draconian. There is no provision in the Bible for adolescence as we understand it today. Therefore, the Society tries to enforce a worldview that was prevalent during that era, one in which it was assumed that a child stopped being a "child" much earlier than is acceptable today. That view is an underlying assumption in all of the cultures from which the Bible sprang.
Just thinking out loud here (figuratively), but I wonder if this isn't the same reason artists depicted the child Christ as a miniature adult in artworks up through the Renaissance?
