Professor X is a Jerk!! At least, that is what we are told way back in the 1988 by an adolescent Kitty Pryde, fresh from an adventure in outer space where an insectoid alien had implanted parasitic alien spawn within all the captured X-men. Upon their return, the mean nasty bald Professor X wanted to send Kitty to the New Mutants, a theoretically non-combative team of students, because he believed that allowing a teen-aged girl to run around with a mutant super hero group was irresponsible. Boy did she show him in the end.
Like most readers of my age group, I grew up in the 80s with a mad crush on Kitty Pryde. At the time, spunky teen heroes like Kitty, the New Mutants, and the Teen Titans resonated with me, though I never really saw the connection. In my mind, there was never any question about whether these child superheroes were even children (specially since they frequently were drawn with better developed bodies than any of the teens I went to school with.) The fact that they should have been in high school was about as relevant to me as the fact that Kid Flash had red hair. They lived without parental supervision, they tackled adult bad guys, they never seemed to go to high school, and they never cussed or snuck a quick cigarette in the back yard when the adults werent looking – how much more adult could you get?