[notabee]

On a positive note, doing this is a very good way to understand people. Even their bad actions make a lot more sense if you delve into some developmental psychology along with just engaging your intuition about what their inner 4 year old wants out of life.

On a negative note, I think most people convince themselves of being much more grown up than they actually are. Really it's far easier to just get meaner and more calloused to survive while suffocating the core self. Maturity is more like a deliberate and careful edifice built with a lot of work, self-reflection, and self-forgiveness. It's not a given that just getting older does that, other than the inhibitory part of the brain getting better at restraining the emotional part after adolescence. (Usually, unless trauma happens that's sufficient to get stuck in a particular development stage.)