(2010-09-01) Henig Adulthood20 Somethings

Robin Marantz Heng asks: Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up? (Adult Hood) The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid Internship-s or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life. (The Family, Life Cycle)

Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett says what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create Adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young... An understanding of the developmental profile of adolescence led, for instance, to the creation of junior high schools (Middle School) in the early 1900s, separating seventh and eighth graders from the younger children in what used to be called primary school. And it led to the recognition that teenagers between 14 and 18, even though they were legally minors, were mature enough to make their own choice of legal guardian in the event of their parents’ deaths.