When teenagers didn’t exist

I am watching a TV show taking place in the year 50s in Italy, L’amica geniale, based on the book by Elena Ferrante, and I was reminded that my generation in Italy was maybe the first one lucky enough to experience a smooth transition between childhood and adulthood. Think about clothes and shoes. Doctor Martens and other flat-heel boots, sneakers, started to be popular in the 90s. I read in Wikipedia that “From 1970 (5 models) over 1998 (285 models) to 2012 (3,371), the number of sport shoe models in the U.S. has grown exponentially”. Before then, you were going from being a kid, with flowery dresses, to a woman, with long skirts and heels, or a man wearing a suit and tie. In the TV show 14 year olds look like copy cats of adults, with their heels and ties. I can imagine how uncomfortable it must have felt to be thrown in the adult world without really feeling like one. I surely didn’t feel like an adult when I started having my period. In my life, boobs came before heels. At the age of 36 I still struggle to feel like an adult sometimes. Maybe I enjoyed this age in between so much that sometimes I am still stuck in it.