What’s Wrong with “Kids” These Days?

From the NYT, a thought-provoking, though problematic, piece about directionless twenty-somethings:

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be – on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life…

And the data to make your teeth chatter:

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” 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. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

It’s pretty difficult to look past the nostalgia with which this piece is written: “The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course,” “young people remain untethered to romantic partners…” With all the changes that occurred in our society between 1960 and 2000, few of which are described here, is it really surprising that people take longer to settle into domesticity than they used to? Moreover, is it a bad thing? It’s one thing to make an emotional appeal to the past, but it’s another to disguise an emotional appeal as conscientious sociology. Presenting statistics out of context, and assigning rigid meanings to such malleable notions as “adulthood” and “growing up,” is not a good way to start an argument that attempts to describe a real social problem.

I will say this: if you look at the past hundred (or two hundred, or thousand) years, it’s pretty clear that the duration of childhood has been steadily growing, especially for the middle class. That is, the amount of time it takes for kids to become adults has been getting longer and longer, and not just since 1960. But this is not necessarily a cause for concern, and it is at least partially explained by a steadily increasing standard of living for the middle class, higher college enrollment rates, the feminist movement, contraception, and many other things that are are generally agreed to be good for society. In the not-so-long-ago days when more people went straight from high school to career-type jobs, it was easier to start a family and become a self-sufficient adult earlier. But now, more people have more time to spend on themselves – educating themselves, traveling, exploring different fields, living in different places, having different partners. Of course these things delay the onset of adulthood, but maybe they also allow for more thorough self-development and make for more responsible – and more experienced – adults in the long run.

I think the important thing to remember is that “adulthood” really can’t be talked about as if it’s an objective term across different social contexts (generations, cultures, etc.). Sociology should be about understanding how each generation defines and reaches adulthood, and what that means for the progress of society over the course of several generations. To suppose that our society has a serious problem on its hands simply because the new generation is taking longer to reach maturity benchmarks x, y, and z than the one before it, is, I think, to pervert sociology into an unreflective game of statistics.