Maturity does not necessarily deepend on age it is reached through experience. In Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, Ender Wiggen is a child military prodigy who attains maturity at a young age because of the situations he experiences and the challenges he surmounts. He is constantly learning and in the end he finds himself as an adult trapped in a child's body.
             Ender is always dealing with conditions throughout his whole life that attribute to his experience. People around him try to mold him into a mature "robot" by giving him strenuous challenges before his time. In the beginning of the novel, people are always watching him and judging him through a monitor that is attached to his neck. This teaches Ender that every move he makes counts. "Everything we do means something, realized Ender." Then when Ender goes to Battle school, Graff, the leader of the school, isolates him by turning the others against him, "Graff had deliberately caused it...when the officer prefers you, the others hate you." Ender learns to develop an independent mind through this. With his independent mind, Ender starts learning about breaking the rules. In the Giant's Drink Game, he beats the game after killing the giant, which no one had thought of before. Also when Ender he shoots in his first battle, he rebelled against his orders not to fire, yet he won the battle. "And soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've given." Even the Battle School is bending the rules. When Ender gets into a fight with four boys and injures them in the Battle Room, the administration passes it off as an accident to protect Ender. The administration ruthlessly wants to use anything against Ender. Including Valentine, his sister. When they use Valentine against Ender, he realizes that he is so hurt that the administration could never hurt him any deeper. "...He decided he was s...