Comment by pharrington

That link is strangely misleading for a medical authority. Yes, the prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped in youth, but saying its responsible for rational decision making is wrong - our current knowledge is that it handles long-term decision making and impulse regulation. While children generally are fundamentally more impulsive than adults, rationality and impulsivity aren't inversely related. For example, dogmatic thinking is a very common form of non-impulsive, attentive, yet irrational decision making.

And yes, children obviously are inexperienced. It takes ALOT of sensory data to achieve general intelligence, and gathering that data (or what the kids these days call "touching grass") simply takes alot of time.