Taking longer to reach adulthood

Who says kids grow up so fast these days? Certainly not a team of sociologists whose research suggests that many twenty- and thirty-somethings aren’t yet adults. Instead, these young people linger for years in a newly emerging generational netherworld, these sociologists contend.

More than two-thirds of all 30-year-old men and slightly more than half of all 30-year-old women would not be considered adults under traditional definitions of adulthood, claims the group of sociologists, which included professors Frank Furstenberg Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania and Ruben Rumbaut of the University of California-Irvine.

They seem stuck somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. “Some features of this stage resemble coming of age during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when youth lingered in a state of semi-autonomy, waiting until they were sufficiently well-off to marry, have children and establish an independent household,” the sociologists write in Contexts, a sociology journal.

A century ago, most young men and women hovering on the cusp of adulthood were in their late teens, the sociologists reported. Today, many are in their thirties and still not grown up. “It takes much longer to make the transition to adulthood today than decades ago, and arguably longer than at any time in America’s history,” they asserted.

They acknowledged that the answer to the question, “Who’s an adult?,” depends on your definition of adulthood. They attempted to answer the question through a battery of questions they developed and added to the 2002 General Social Survey, an opinion poll administered to a random sample of 1,400 people aged 18 and older. The questions measured the importance of seven traditional benchmarks of maturity and their effect on individuals’ perceptions of adulthood.

Virtually everyone in the survey agreed on four benchmarks – completing your education, being financially independent, having a full-time job and being able to support a family. But other traditional markers of adulthood seem less important now than in the past, these researchers believe. Of those surveyed, eight in 10 said it was necessary to leave your parents’ house to be considered an adult. Slightly more than half said getting married (55 percent) or having a child (52 percent) is a necessary requirement for being considered an adult. Those circumstances are increasingly seen as “life choices” rather than markers of maturity.

Then the sociologists used census data to see what percentage of 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds had met all seven characteristics in 1960 and in 2000. In 1960, they found that 9 percent of all 20-year-old men and 29 percent of all women met the traditional test of adulthood. But in 2000, only 2 percent of young men and 6 percent of young women met this standard.

The most surprising results were among 30-year-olds. In 1960, 66 percent of 30-year-old men and 75 percent of 30-year-old women were considered adults, compared with just 31 percent of men and 46 percent of women that age in 2000.

But what if we applied a more “modern” standard of adulthood – one that excludes marriage and kids – to these data?

The adult gap closes dramatically. “In 2000, 70 percent of men aged 30 had left home, were financially independent and had completed their schooling, just 12 (percentage) points lower than was true of 30-year-old men in 1960,” the sociologists reported. Among women, the differences were similarly smaller – about 75 percent of 30 year-old women met the test for adulthood, compared to 85 percent in 1960.