<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=general&src=me[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=general&src=me</a></p>
<ul>
<li>should have been “emerging” in the title…</li>
</ul>
<p>Only if they have tall blue hairdos, then they are emarging. Otherwise, they are emerging.</p>
<p>I have noticed this as well.
</p>
<p>Some of it is ( IMO) hard not to be worried about.
I see quite a few people living with their parents in their mid/late 20’s- & I am sorry - but even while I would be very open to helping me kids out as much as I could & I love their company- it seems weird to me. ( this is after college graduation and after finding work)</p>
<p>I even ( bad mom) almost wish that my youngest, who has been at home this summer, was away at camp, as she has been every year since she was 8.</p>
<p>How can I enjoy quasi retirement/second youth if I am in mom mode?</p>
<p>On the one hand I think not settling down and starting a family in your early 20’s just because it is " expected" is a good thing- but for example our neighbors ( a man and woman roommates not dating) who are in their early 30’s , seem to be having this extended adolescence- of working late and staying up until the wee hours socializing.</p>
<p>But.
At least they have jobs, they keep their yard nice and are friendly- I don’t think that marrying should be criteria for deciding if someone is an adult and given the child abuse rate in this country I don’t think giving birth ( or fathering a child) is anything that determines how mature and responsible you are.</p>
<p>How about being an informed voter, making charitable contributions of ( time/money)
and staying out of jail?
;)</p>
<p>I’m so there ^^^</p>
<p>I think with longer life expectancies, perhaps it is “natural” that launching takes longer. Certainly childhood is longer in terms of the age that mandatory education goes to, at what age the work force can be joined and so on.</p>
<p>Having said that, I hope that my son is able to maintain his independence once he graduates from college. He was ready to be done with high school and move out when he was 15!</p>
<p>My son was all over this article and practically recited it to us from memory tonight at dinner. We are in his new city moving him into his “emerging adult” apartment, which, thankfully, is over 1300 miles away from us. Not that we don’t enjoy him- in small doses- but I want him to “emerge” on his own. His take from the article is that young people in their 20s still count on their parents to help support them since they aren’t going to get married until their 30s. He said if he or any of his friends (very active social lives) got engaged, it would be shocking to everyone. He also said he was sad about college ending, but after some thought, has decided that the rest of his 20s are going to be pretty good. He won’t have as much money as he would like, but he will have fun. He does have a good job that pays (in my opinion) pretty well. He won’t be buying a Porsche this year, but he knows he is lucky to have no student loans and no car payment.<br>
I am finding this “launching” of my WildChild into this new city and career a lot more difficult than sending him off to college- or even boarding school. We’ve been through a lot with this kid, and it’s hard to believe he is an adult. Well, I hope he is. He’s shown so many signs, but then there is some regression. What’s with the Bud Light baseball cap? Is he 15?<br>
H and I are heading to the mountains Sunday for a few days of vacation and recovery after we say goodbye to him.</p>
<p>Well, I didn’t read the whole thing, but when will someone write about the true "emerging adults’ – us empty nesters? I feel like I’m enjoying a second go-around of my 20s, but without the insecurities.</p>
<p>I found the article interesting & even had time to discuss it with my d. (age 22) and her bf (a couple of months shy of 24)… but I don’t think they related. Both are employed full time, supporting themselves, and worried about issues like whether to use or accumulate vacation pay from their jobs, and the impact of their recessionary-economy starting salaries on future earning capacity. My son, now age 27, is married & a father, and has been supporting himself and living on his own since age 20. If anything, my kids have had it rougher than I did and have had to do their growing up sooner – I had parental support through law school, and was somewhat older than my son when I married and started a family.</p>
<p>I think that a lot of this “delayed” taking on of adult responsibilities is just a function of economics – on the more privileged end of the scale, parents with the means to do so are willing to subsidize their kids to a greater extent – and on the lower end of the economic scale, it may simply not be economically feasible for young adults to move out on their own. Housing costs are exponentially higher than they were when I was in my 20s --as are other basic living costs, such as health insurance, etc. My kids happened to have found work in different cities from where I live – so of course they are on their own. They don’t get continued funding from me because I’m not in a position to help them financially – at least not in a big, dependency producing way – so they don’t have the option to “emerge” – though of course they have hopes and dreams and don’t plan to spend the rest of their lives in the same jobs that they have now. </p>
<p>If it is a function of economics… then I don’t see how it can be a “developmental stage” … any more than one could characterize my present stage in life as “retirement” – even though I am a card-carrying member of AARP and others my age have, indeed, retired. I just think that there is a something of a cultural shift that’s very closely tied to economics and the realistic ability of young people to adopt the same standard of living their parents had on the salaries they are capable of earning in their early 20’s.</p>
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</p>
<p>This sums it up very well. </p>
<p>My emerging adults have jobs that don’t pay enough to live alone on their own, but they have chosen to live with room mates, and they’re fine with that. It sort of prolongs the college phase, but what are the choices? Their jobs are not near our home, so that choice doesn’t exist. I would certainly not discourage their living at home to save money for awhile if they did have jobs near here, but it didn’t work out that way. I don’t see anything immature about living at home for a little while to save money, and I have friends whose kids are doing just that. Those young adults have jobs that would have allowed them to live on their own and save money back when my DH and I were starting out. But not anymore, not in this economy.</p>
<p>bookiemom, Is that from Blue Girl?</p>
<p>I think there is a real entitlement mentality among many young people … and many parents are more than willing to support their “children” in the style to which they have allowed them to become accustomed.</p>
<p>There are folks whose custom is to have their kids live with them until they get married (and sometimes even after that). But for most folks in our country, the custom has long been for young people to move out & take care of themselves. For many years, that meant living a lifestyle that was “less” than they enjoyed with their parents, at least until they could save up & afford more. Over the last couple decades, though, this has been slowly changing. Young people don’t want to live a lesser lifestyle, and parents don’t seem willing to allow their offspring to live a lesser lifestyle.</p>
<p>My D has thanked H & me recently for raising her to live within her means. She knows what things cost, and she is willing to sacrifice & live on less in order to be on her own. She told us that she loves us dearly, but that she doesn’t want to return to the nest … and she doesn’t expect us to subsidize her adult lifestyle. We are quite thankful!</p>
<p>I have long felt that our societal need to have it all, right now is leading us down a path that might not be very beneficial in the long run. The house of cards is falling down now. Will our “emarging adults” be able to build it back up? I hope so.</p>
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</p>
<p>Really? Do you actually know young people who feel this way? My kids and their friends have very realistic expectations, and they all came from fairly “privileged” families.
They are just happy to have some kind of job and be able to live either with room mates or at home and save money. Several have taken jobs in distant cities because that’s where the jobs are–DC, Boston, San Francisco, etc. And they’re expensive cities, so doubling up is the usual expectation. My daughter (Boston) would love to have her own place, but doesn’t see it happening in the near future (she has three room mates.) I don’t hear any whining. They’re enjoying their independence, even if they don’t have a lot of material things. If anything, this generation seems less hung up on material things than their parents!</p>
<p>I hear all the time that we are so entitled, and I am inclined to believe it is true, but nobody I know is not acutely aware of the fact that they are going to be living in tiny apartments with roommates after graduation, if they can find work to even get that far, and they are all happy as can be with the arrangement because at least it’s not living with their parents. Maybe it’s just because we live in a region that was at one point ground zero for the recession, if it isn’t still such, but the people I know are not even walking out of college feeling entitled to employment.</p>
<p>I am not sure what I am doing yet. My parents offered to let me stay with them until my wedding in 2012 (I am graduating 2011), but I am undecided. If I do stay it is not out of a refusal to live within my means or refusal to accept responsibility, quite the contrary. I am accepting that living within my means and being financially responsible at this point in my life may mean accepting my parents’ offer, which is of great personal sacrifice because I want very, very badly to be on my own, even if it is with roommates, but that may not be the wisest thing for me to do while other options are on the table. That’s sad commentary on my bank account but it is what it is.</p>
<p>I think there is a wide split in economic terms in where those of my generation landed & from where they have been able to launch their own children.</p>
<p>People my ( deceased) parent’s age, who raised families in the( 50’s) 60’s & 70’s, often times attended instate colleges, were able to work their way through college if need be & also were able to purchase a home, or had one built in the new suburbs to raise their kids.( often with one income)</p>
<p>Some of these parents did quite well, although they were often less frugal than their own parents who had lived through the depression/WWII. </p>
<p>When my H and I started a family( in the early 1980’s) neither one of us had attended college although we managed to buy a small fixer home in the city.
While my own grandparents, who had been blue collar workers their entire lives,( my grandpa with only an 8th grade education/ my grandma had finished high school,)
had been able to pay cash for a very nice home, in a very nice neighborhood in Seattle- pay for blue collar work in the 80’s had stagnated. </p>
<p>What was decent pay when we were 25 in the mid '80’s, is not so great with inflation when you are 35, and knowing that you just make a few dollars more an hour when you are 55 than you did 20 yrs previous is demoralizing, especially as the work has gotten more complex/demanding physically & mentally.</p>
<p>But the pay wasn’t there even before NAFTA for hundreds of thousands of workers. After NAFTA, a livable wage is hard to find for many.</p>
<p>While our kids are always more than welcome here, they had nicer/roomier living conditions at college. College housing for older D was a two bed/bath town home, and after that she had lived in very large older homes with roommates. ( we live in a two bedroom* one bathroom* bungalow.)</p>
<p>Younger D is going to be living in an apt sophomore year, that from the sounds of what furniture she thinks she needs is * much* bigger than our house.</p>
<p>I can understand why some young people decide that saving what they can while continuing under their parents roof seems like the best choice. Perhaps for some it is, but I also feel that money, is only one piece to the puzzle.</p>
<p>I moved out in the mid 70’s, when I was 17 & I like many kids, felt I was grown up and no matter how nice my mother’s house, it was still * her* house.</p>
<p>
I think that is a generalization that simply doesn’t apply to the vast majority of families, who simply don’t live a “lifestyle” that is much behind paying for basic necessities.</p>
<p>Of course youngsters live with roommates (or housemates) – my son had shared housing up until the time he shifted from living with platonic friends to his now-wife. And while I briefly lived alone after law school, I was unhappy and chose to move to shared housing situation within 6 months – it’s lonely to be on your own. Who wants to come home to an empty house after a day at work? The big difference that I experienced --and that I have seen my kids experience – with the transition from school to career is a shift in schedule. No more going out to socialize late at night – you are too tired when you get home from work, you just want to relax, take it easy – have dinner, relax a couple of hours, and go to bed. And it’s a lot nicer to have other people around to do that-- so even without the economic factors, roommates are nice for those who aren’t living with romantic partners. </p>
<p>Many of the places my son has lived along the way are nicer than the home he grew up in – our home is a modest tract home – the kids’ bedrooms were pretty small – so it wasn’t all that hard to find a house or apartment that was bigger, or in a nicer neighborhood. Right now my son’s rented home is larger and nicer than the home I own, though his rent is less than my monthly mortgage payment – so it’s not all that impossible for the offspring of median income earners to achieve a similar “lifestyle”. </p>
<p>I read an article a couple of weeks ago about how it is finally beginning to dawn on psychologists that many of their findings from experiments on college students over the years may not generalize to the rest of the humans on this planet – [The</a> Trouble With Using Undergrads for Research - Newsweek](<a href=“http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/23/what-s-really-human.html]The”>The Trouble With Using Undergrads for Research) – I think this “emerging adulthood” theory may fit the same bill. That is, the “researchers” are living in a bubble where they see a small subsegment of the population – college-educated young adults from privileged backgrounds – and they want to generalize their observations to the rest of the planet, when all they are really seeing are the growing pains of that particular set of young adults, who simply are behaving in accordance with their own life experience. Keep in mind that many young people from privileged backgrounds have financial resources other than employment – there’s no motivation for them to take some low-wage job if they’ve got a trust fund to fall back on, so they dabble and explore. </p>
<p>Also, kids who grew up in the 90’s probably came to expect good times for the future because of the economic boom – so a recessionary economy is something of a shock and surprise for them. Again – this is a function of economics. I’m the child of parents who grew up during the depression and experienced WWII as young adults – so naturally that generation grew up fast. Then I grew up in the 60’s… but came out of college and law school into the recession of the 80’s… which may be why I don’t see all that much difference between my kids’ experience and my own, except (as noted) that my kids seem slightly ahead of the “growing up” curve than I did. But I’d attribute that largely to the the fact that I’m divorced – which I think forced my kids to face some harsher economic realities earlier on – essentially their “nest” was disrupted in a very profound way in early childhood.</p>
<p>I just want to add – I don’t want to make my comments be about my kids and their experiences either – I know many other young adults with “hard luck” background stories who seem to have done their growing up early. I think that humans transition into adulthood when they need to – the mental equipment is there in early adolescence, the emotional part comes when circumstances require. In a sense, I didn’t really feel like a “grownup” until I had children – and I can see the same transition in my son, at a younger age than when I and his father first experienced parenthood – but that’s not a function of age, it’s a function of experience. I’ve known young people who entered the military right after high school, some going off to Iraq or Afghanistan… and they seem to have done a lot of growing up, very quickly – as well.</p>
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</p>
<p>:D Good one.</p>
<p>Interesting concept, but I don’t wholly buy into it. I think this belongs more as a sociological study on behavior norms, rather than psychological stage of development argument. If it is acceptable behavior for 20-somethings to be dependent on their parents many will choose to take advantage of that situation, but by no means do I think this is an entire phase of development. As a generalization of our culture, people in the US are currently accepting this type of behavior from 20-somethings, and economically a fair number of families have the means to provide for such opportunities, (or at least attempt to provide these opportunities, in a sort of “keeping up with the Joneses” sense.) I believe this is why we are seeing greater emergence of a slower pace for the acceptance of the responsibilities of adulthood.</p>
<p>My personal feeling is that by the age of 23, most people are able to handle the responsibilities of adulthood from a biological standpoint, [but I don’t claim to be a biologist] - whether they have adequately been prepared for those, (both skills-wise and emotionally,) is a different story. That story is not one that makes for an entire new phase of development to be recognized, but rather sociological questions of our values and teachings. As a 28 year old, who hasn’t accepted financial support from my parents since I received my bachelor’s at age 20, I could become frustrated by watching the potential of some of my age cohort being squandered or even just put on hold. Part of me knows that with the contraction in the job market, this could be a good thing, because if all these “emerging adults” were to be competing for jobs right now that may not be such a great thing. But the rest of me, almost feels a sense of regret for those who are well into their 20s, and haven’t yet been able to experience the struggle of becoming financially, socially, emotionally independent. And a sense of loss for persons with tons of potential, who aren’t moving forward and using their innate and learned abilities to do something productive. I feel that the longer one waits to take on the responsibility of adulthood, the smaller their chances are of actually truly achieving full independence are. </p>
<p>I also do not necessarily agree that the 5 markers of adulthood that they are using are good measuring stick of a psychological paradigm - I personally do not plan on having children, (I take issue with the expectation that I should contribute to human overpopulation,) others may never marry, etc. Again this is a change in cultural norms - not a change in biology/psychology. I fully agree with calmom, on the concept that growing into an adult is a function of experience. Becoming a parent, fighting in the military, caring for a sick/disabled parent, being made to be responsible for your own basic needs, etc. are all situations that help bring you into adulthood. </p>
<p>I am opposed to government support of the delaying of adulthood - i.e. states, such as New Jersey, requiring health insurance plans to cover “dependents” through the age of 30. Aside from the fact that personally if at 29 years old I was considered a dependent of anyone I would be humiliated(by my social norms); there is no ethical reason that I agree with, (other than the contraction of the job market - which is an indicator of a much larger problem,) for a government to advocate this for its young, capable citizens. </p>
<p>Why are we socially, emotionally, or intellectually crippling our young adults by coddling them? Why are we not allowing them to learn to think for themselves? Why are we not allowing them to experience struggles and the knowledge and triumph of overcoming those challenges? What are we gaining by making it socially acceptable to not contribute to the larger good of society, by delaying being productive members? Why are we not fulfilling our responsibility to create succeeding generations that can individually and collectively can create, solve, resolve, do, lead, and so forth? Why are we setting our children up to be enslaved by their lack of ability for problem solving, independent thought, mechanical/physical skills, financial skills, etc?</p>
<p>*Disclaimers: I wrote with great generalizations above and I realize many 20-somethings do not fit the profile of “emerging adults,” but this was not my concept, merely my emotional response to the concept presented in the linked article.</p>
<p>^^^^Extremely well said. I agree with you wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>My personal feeling is that by the age of 23, most people are able to handle the responsibilities of adulthood from a biological standpoint,</p>
<p>* Biologically* speaking, humans reach sexual maturity 10 years earlier- although physiologically their bodies and brains continue to develop till 18-20 yrs.</p>
<p>*Becoming a parent, fighting in the military, caring for a sick/disabled parent, being made to be responsible for your own basic needs, etc. are all situations that help bring you into adulthood. *</p>
<p>As can a lot of other situations, however those same situations may contribute to making someone opportunistic, controlling &/or violent- not characteristics for a healthy member of society.</p>
<p>* i.e. states, such as New Jersey, requiring health insurance plans to cover “dependents” through the age of 30.*</p>
<p>That sounds fairly lengthy, I had never heard of that. Generally doesn’t ins just cover them ( except in the case of disabilities), until the early 20’s? However- if our national ins program ever kicks in- I hope that will be addressed .</p>
<p>Why are we socially, emotionally, or intellectually crippling our young adults by coddling them? Why are we not allowing them to learn to think for themselves?</p>
<p>In the cases that I know of, where young adults are still living in the family home- no one is twisting their arm. In fact, they have been encouraged to expand their comfort zone, to the point of all but pushing them out the door.
How do you coddle someone who doesnt want to be pandered to?
Sounds difficult to me.</p>
<p>Why are we setting our children up to be enslaved by their lack of ability for problem solving, independent thought, mechanical/physical skills, financial skills, etc?</p>
<p>I do agree that many adults including young adults do not have problem solving skills, are not able to think creatively, and can’t do a lot without a specific checklist.</p>
<p>I wonder if the predilection for standardized testing in the schools as a measure of success, rather than the evaluation of curriculum and judging teacher effectiveness by student test scores, without looking at how many students are able to be successful in life/college/work, has taken away the impetus for things that can’t be weighed & measured. Like creativity & innovation.</p>