There is something extraordinarily efficient about turning 18.
At midnight, you acquire the legal status of an adult. Unfortunately, nobody tells your bank account, your nervous system, your Grade 11 timetable or the adults who were supposed to have prepared you for it.
A young woman came to live with our family after it became clear that returning home was no longer safe for her. She was eighteen and in Grade 11.
Legally, she was an adult. In most of the practical ways that keep a young person functioning, she still needed what other 18-year-olds need: somewhere to live, food, transport, healthcare, support with school and adults who could help when life became too complicated to manage alone.
The difference was that the family structure that would ordinarily provide those things was the structure from which she needed protection.
South African law does not assume that financial dependence ends at 18. A parent's duty to support a child who cannot yet support herself can continue into adulthood, and our courts have recognised the fairly obvious reality that many 18-year-olds have not even finished school.
Socially, though, we are much less consistent about what adulthood means.
Most reasonably secure young adults receive an extraordinary amount of support without anybody calling it support. There is food in the fridge and a bed that remains theirs. Medical aid continues. Wi-Fi exists. Someone pays for transport or puts petrol in the car. There is probably at least one streaming password they are not paying for and an adult somewhere who knows what to do when a form asks for something incomprehensible.
We are remarkably relaxed about dependency when it belongs to our own children. An 18-year-old can eat our food, use our Wi-Fi, remain on our medical aid and mysteriously never buy toilet paper, and we still describe them as becoming independent.
Which, of course, they are.
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Independence is usually something young people grow into while standing on a considerable amount of somebody else's infrastructure. If university, college or training follows school, that process can take years. We don't regard the groceries as evidence that they lack agency or the medical aid as an alarming failure to launch.
Take that ordinary family infrastructure away and independence looks rather different.
That teen may be perfectly capable of deciding that she needs to see a doctor and completely incapable of paying the bill. She may know where she wants to live without being able to afford rent. She can have legal rights and no idea how to exercise them, particularly when doing so involves applications, documents, lawyers or courtrooms.
She can also, as in our case, be expected at school the next morning.
When this young woman moved into our home, the immediate crisis became less visible because the things that had made it a crisis began to disappear. She had somewhere safe to sleep. She stayed at school. Medical appointments happened. There was food, transport, data and shampoo. When paperwork was needed, somebody dealt with it.
From the outside, things looked better because they were better.
What took me longer to understand was where the unmet need had gone. Much of it had simply moved into our household.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me because informal support can make a formal problem look solved. If extended family, friends, a partner's parents or another adult step in, a vulnerable young person may remain housed, educated and cared for while the official processes around her grind along at their own pace.
This is a good thing. Somebody stepped in.
It is also expensive, which is an inconvenient feature of almost everything described as support.
Not simply in money, although there is plenty of that. There is time off work, transport, appointments, school administration, phone calls, documents, waiting rooms and the peculiar amount of energy required to establish which person in which office can answer a question that appeared, when you first asked it, to have a perfectly straightforward answer.
And then there is the actual money.
Food does not become free because the person eating it arrived under difficult circumstances. Neither do doctors, therapy, school costs or legal advice. If the support a young adult needs has to be pursued formally, things become particularly efficient: the eighteen-year-old without sufficient resources may first need money, legal knowledge and a functioning printer to establish her right to resources.
That is a strange position in which to place someone who is still trying to finish school.
Our family has been able to absorb much of this. I am glad we could. But our ability to keep a young woman at school, get her to appointments and put supper on the table cannot reasonably be taken as evidence that the underlying problem resolved itself.
In some ways, competent informal support makes the gap harder to see.
Had nobody stepped forward, an 18-year-old schoolgirl without a safe home would have been recognisably in crisis. Once she is sleeping in somebody else's spare room, arriving at school and making it to her medical appointments, the urgency becomes less obvious.
She looks supported because she is. The more difficult question is who is doing the supporting, what it costs and what happens when they cannot.
None of this requires us to treat such a teen as a child. The young woman living with us has opinions about her own life and every right to them. Supporting her has involved learning when to step in and when to get out of the way. Occasionally my solution has even been excellent, which makes it particularly irritating that it is still her life.
Dependence and agency coexist perfectly well. We prove that every day in ordinary families.
Parents support adult children through matric, university, first jobs and the financially alarming business of becoming a functioning person. They pay medical aid without assuming ownership of the person using it. They provide a bedroom without requiring the occupant to surrender her adulthood at the door.
The problem becomes much harder when the family itself cannot safely provide that transition.
A young person in that position does not need less agency. She may, however, need substantially more practical support to exercise it. Expecting otherwise imposes a standard of independence on her that many of us would consider absurd if applied to our own 18-year-olds.
There is another part of this that I had not properly considered before.
The young people best equipped to deal with systems are often those who have adults around them who already understand systems. Somebody knows which documents are needed, where to send the email, how to challenge an incorrect decision or whom to call when nothing happens.
The young person without that infrastructure may therefore be expected to exercise adult rights through systems that assume she already possesses some of the resources she is trying to secure.
There is something particularly circular about needing a capable adult to help prove that you should not have to depend on a capable adult.
This is why the months after an unsafe young person leaves home deserve far more attention than they receive. The departure is visible. The accommodation, groceries, healthcare, education, administration and slow construction of actual independence are much easier to miss, particularly when somebody else is making them work.
The young woman living with us is in Grade 12 now. Like thousands of her peers, she is legally an adult and still becoming one. The difference is that the family structure that would ordinarily carry some of that transition could not safely do so.
Adulthood gives her agency over her own life, as it should. But agency does not pay for a bedroom, a doctor's appointment or supper, and acknowledging that does not make her less adult. It makes our understanding of adulthood rather more realistic.
We already know this when the teen is our own child. We need to remember it when she cannot safely be.
Nicola Killops is an education and media specialist, creative content creator and neurodiversity advocate