Posted on 05/02/2005 8:31:54 AM PDT by qam1
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - (KRT) - Signs of the new normal for young adults seem to be piling up like ripe sweat socks in the bedroom of your 20-something son down the hall.
We used to dismiss it as a "slacker" thing - an odd fad, we thought, of a generation that appeared content to take its sweet time before leaving the nest, finishing college, getting married and making commitments their parents began considering at 18.
Researchers now prefer the term "adultescence," and they're not kidding. The life stage between the late teens and late 20s is undergoing what many describe as a permanent transformation brought on by economic, educational and even biological forces, all irreversible.
"It has happened quietly, and it's here to stay," said David Morrison, president of Twentysomething Inc., a market research firm that has tracked the lifestyles of young adults for 15 years. "The stigma of depending on your parents is gone."
Consider some of the factors: Grinding college debt. Spiraling home values. An ideal of marriage, tempered by a culture of divorce, that waits for the perfect soul mate.
Gone is the labor economy of high-paying factory jobs that once offered a lifetime of security after high school. Here to stay, at least for a few more decades, are baby-boom parents who easily fret and don't mind indulging their kids.
When will we - or should we - grow up?
Here are the latest indicators of a society willing to wait:
The average age of U.S. women marrying for the first time has climbed from about 21 to 26 since 1970.
The average age of first-time homebuyers has climbed from 29 to 33 in the last decade.
Four-year bachelor's degrees now usually take five years to complete. Students juggle more and longer internships, often unpaid, enabling workplaces to get by without expanding their staffs.
One in five 26-year-olds is living with a parent, according to a recent Time cover story that coined yet another generational label, "twixters."
They are "a new breed of young people who won't - or can't? - settle down," the magazine proclaimed. "They're betwixt and between."
In March even the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the elastic state of maturity, bumping up to 18 the minimum age that young murderers can face execution for their crimes.
Before ruling, the court reviewed new studies showing some areas of judgment and reason in the brain do not fully develop until well into a person's 20s.
So, get used to adultescents - also known as the "kidults," "thresholders," and "boomerang babies." Sociologists say we will be seeing more in years to come.
In fact, their numbers are multiplying worldwide: Germany calls them nesthockers, or nest squatters. Italy has charted a 50 percent increase since 1990 in mammones, or people who won't eat anywhere but mama's.
In fast-growing Asian nations, living with the folks is the custom.
In the Kansas City region, more college graduates are returning home to stay a spell with their parents, and more parents seem happy to help in the face of harsh economic truths.
"My dad couldn't wait to see me come back," said Brandee Smith, 25, who last year stopped throwing her monthly paycheck at an Overland Park, Kan., apartment and returned to her childhood home. She is now stowing away savings from her marketing job to make a down payment on a house of her own.
"It's nice to come home after a 10-hour workday with dinner already made and brownies waiting," the University of Kansas graduate said. "Even though you've graduated, a lot of parents don't see you as a complete adult."
Or, in the prevailing view, 21st-century market forces won't let you become a complete adult.
"I used to think raising kids was a 21-year commitment, but now I think it's more like 25 to 28 years," said Pat Stilen, a single mother in the Northland who welcomed back daughter Mary Stilen a few years ago.
Mary, then a recent graduate of the University of Nebraska, was working in a restaurant while struggling to land a career tied to her broadcast journalism major.
An 18-month stay in mom's basement allowed Mary Stilen to pay off $5,000 in credit card bills, make a dent in her student loans, replace the car she had been driving since 16 and recalibrate her future. Now she works in a dean's office at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she is close to receiving a master's of business administration degree.
She and her mother wonder how Mary would have landed on her feet otherwise.
"I'd encourage parents to get past their old expectations of when kids will become independent," Pat Stilen said. "Economic times are such, the rules have to change."
The rules already have shifted for a generation that, so far, isn't living as well now compared with when their parents got rolling. For full-time workers between ages 25 and 34, annual earnings adjusted for inflation dropped 17 percent from 1971 to 2002.
Other evidence indicates young adults are choosing to wait longer for their independence. And as life expectancy climbs, experts think that's OK. Could putting off a long-term commitment such as home-buying stave off bankruptcy down the road?
"Some of this is choice, but so much more relates to jobs and the economy," said Robert Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. "Used to be, at 18, you could start testing the waters of adulthood. ... Now, it's a master's degree and beyond to stay ahead.
"It's not so much that society is getting used to it. It's that social and economic forces have set it up in the first place."
Delayed adulthood appears to be taking root in the teen years - driving a car, for example.
As of 2002, only 43 percent of youths ages 16 and 17 were licensed drivers, down from 52 percent a decade earlier, according to a recent report of the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Although America boasts about a half-million more teens in that age group than two decades ago, those with driver's licenses dropped from 4.1 million to 3.5 million.
"Every generation has its rites of passage, and it used to be getting a driver's license," said Janet Rose, a lecturer of American studies at UMKC. "But at the moment, something like body piercing seems as meaningful a rite of passage."
Soaring gasoline prices don't help. Neither do high insurance costs, especially for the young. Both of these factors have spurred public schools to drop driver education unless a huge fee comes with it.
"I've got friends who drive and some who don't - it's pretty equal," said Patrick Camacho of Lenexa, Kan., who is taking courses at the Kansas Driving School so he may get his license the week he turns 17. "I want to be able to go where I want."
But given that teens are far more accident-prone than are drivers in their 30s, it may be that yesterday's notions about the entry age of adulthood were nonsense.
As the Supreme Court found in reconsidering the death penalty for youths, the latest science shows strong evidence that areas of the brain mature slower than researchers traditionally thought.
Forget the old method of simply weighing brains to determine growth: at age 18 or 40, they seem identical. Yet when it comes to gray matter and the millions of cerebral connections that make humans think like adults, magnetic resonance imaging reveals the wiring may not be fully complete until the mid- to late-20s.
The connections related to impulse, judgment and "thinking ahead" are the last to be soldered.
At Harvard Medical School, researchers have found that youths as old as 17 don't always tap the same brain areas as do 30-year-old subjects when shown photos of people's faces and asked to name the correct emotion.
"If someone insults you at work, an older teen is more likely to throw a punch where an adult would pause and make a sarcastic comment," said sociologist James Cote of the University of Western Ontario.
Before today's "emerging adults" feel ready to plunge into the real world, some such as Anthony Shop choose to pace themselves in hopes of getting it right the first time.
Shop is a senior at William Jewell College. He has a Truman Scholarship to attend the graduate school of his pick. First he'll spend at least a year trying out jobs in journalism, speechwriting or something dealing in international relations.
"Right now I'm thinking international relations ... but it kind of changes by the month," said Shop. "At 22, I don't think it's necessary to choose a permanent career, so long as I'm exploring and thinking about it. Some people have no idea."
Hardly a slacker, Shop already has seen England and Germany as a student. So why wait longer to complete his studies?
It's partly because graduate admissions officials recommend it.
Grab an internship or two, or even six. See other places, try different fields, know what you want, enjoy. It's as much the advice of boomers as it is the natural calling of adultescents.
"We're probably hearing that more from family and professionals in their 40s and 50s," Shop said. "People of that generation look back and think maybe they could've taken more time."
While caution beats rushing into a chosen field, sociologist Cote places some of the cause of stalled adulthood on elders dishing up "false promises and false hopes" to the young.
"We give everyone as much choice as possible. We tell them they all can become doctors or lawyers, when we know the truth is relatively few people wind up there," Cote said. "That's either too much hope or we're lying to them."
Scott Kramer, 37, knows.
He was 18 when he first entered college, and his circuitous journey through academia continues. Now a KU graduate student, Kramer finally will land a master's degree in higher education administration next month.
"If you think back to the mid-80s, when I started, all the yuppies were living life in the fast lane," Kramer said. "The message was: Go out and get it now."
So he tried. Just two weeks after Kramer graduated from high school, his impulses - overcharged by the breakup of his parents - drove him to enter Ball State University in Indiana.
That college dismissed him a couple of times as Kramer jumped from one hot-ticket pursuit to the next.
"Gosh, I've had so many majors," he said: accounting, chemical technology, exercise physiology. He gave up classes for a stretch in the 1990s, worked full time and got married. In the late-`90s economic boom, he enrolled full time at Purdue University in hopes of becoming a financial planner.
"In `99, I'd listen to all the experts about going into financial planning. ... Then the economy went bad." And his marriage fell apart. He moved back in with his mother before he landed at KU.
Here, he may have found his true calling.
Interning at KU's Student Involvement and Leadership Center, Kramer assists nontraditional students wade through financial needs, child-care issues and life's ever-changing expectations.
He wants to make a career of it.
"This," Kramer has discovered, "is my niche."
The part about fewer teens driving is soooo true.
My 17 year old is the only one of his friends that drives.
The kids keep their restricted licenses, but don't convert to a full driver's license because that immediately ups your insurance payment about $250 per month.
Well, it is either that or they shack up early.
Probably good to pay down their debts.
College education is a waste on an 18 year old. Too much partying. Let'em work in the real world a while (as I did as an enlisted man for 4 years) to learn what life is really like and to gain some focus, then go to back to school when you are able to understand the serious business that college is. My 2 cents worth.
I think much of this could be empirically quantified. That is, check ratios of wages/income of graduates against certain indicators, such as housing cost, transportation, food, etc. and hold the values in constant dollars and see if there really is an increase in economic pressure on today's twentysomethings.
On the other hand, I think there is a strong element of wanting instant and perfect gratification. As the article suggested, are twentysomething waiting to find that mythical, "perfect soul-mate"? Are twentysomethings unwilling to live in an apartment because they think they deserve a house right away?
In other words, absent hard economic data, perhaps we should assume that the expectations of these twentysomethings, pampered by their relatively affluent parents, may have unreasonable expectations, an indicator of which may be large personal credit card debt at a young age that contributes to their economic troubles.
When I got out of the USAF and was going to college, I did something crazy to afford my apartment....I got ROOMMATES!
Good for you! That's the way this is supposed to work - this business of growing up.
I got out of college when I was 22 and out of my mother's house three months later. THAT was a big day!
That's great, I had roommates too. But my point was, if these kids are sponging off the public I have a right to bitch about it, if it is a private family arrangement I don't really.
The funny thing is...I have a marketing degree but didn't actually need it for my job! My first job out of college needed a degree and I barely made 22 grand that year. I now make 3 times that and while having a degree certainly made my resume look better it wasn't a must.
I have three children with summer/fall birthdays and I sent them all to Kindergarten right away at age 4/5 (not holding them back until they are 6, the current fad) so that when they are 17, they can move out of the house!
I see no reason why they can't rent a cheap room in a basement somewhere, like I did.
The cost of living in California is higher. A LOT higher. And some careers don't pay off as well, or as soon, as young people are led to believe.
This drives me crazy. There are no excuses. If you make the right choices, you get where you want to be. I'm 26, put myself though college and graduated in 2001 with a degree in Journalism, but found a job that made decent money. I never went back to my parents. I am now married, and own a house that has almost doubled in value since we bought it, and have plenty in savings.
Now granted, the house may not have come along without meeting my husband in college, but still. I think I'd still be in a great situation if that didn't happen.
It's about the right choices. My mom raised my sister and I working 3 jobs, and I learned that I did not what that to happend to my kids some day. I wanted to be able to provide for my family the things that I was never offered.
It can be done.
Why is every generation worse than the generation before? Many young married couples in the early 1950's had to live with their parents before they could buy a house. During the immigration years in this country apartments housed up to 8 adults, married or not. When families had large farms early in this country, the parents would GIVE their children land to build their own homes and live near by.
Baby boomers aren't paying for college so the kids have alot of debt. Divorce if so high that these kids have no one helping them make decisions because their parents are too concerned with themselves. 20 year olds now have to pay auto insurance, health care, and high taxes on everything. When I moved out in the 70's, car insurance was an option, health care was cheap, renting was cheap, gas for my car was 70 cents, ciggs were 50 cents.
Also these kids are lied too. College is NOT for everyone. You still have to have a high IQ to graduate in a good major. Yet the boomers want their kids to go to college , take out loans and let the tax payer worry about them paying it back.
So, get used to adultescents - also known as the "kidults," "thresholders," and "boomerang babies." Sociologists say we will be seeing more in years to come.
I am mentoring some guys just out of prison. They remind me of Peter Pan.......just don't want to grow up.
This is not a radically new social trend; it's simply a return to the way things used to be in this and many other countries. Think of it as the "family manor" trend. Baby-boomers grew up sharing a small bedroom with one sibling and a bathroom with two or three more. Just watch a rerun of "The Brady Bunch". Nowadays, kids have their own bedrooms and, more and more often, each bedroom has a bathroom. The "bunkhouse" mentality was replaced by the "suite" approach. When baby-boomers returned from college, there wasn't much insentive for them to move into their parents' cramped house. Today, a 23 year old college grad with a good relationship with his or her parents has the choice of living on the cheap in some apartment or living in his old "suite" in his parents' manor house with all the fixings (pool, big kitchen, cable/satellite, etc.).
It cuts both ways, how many parents move in with their kids when they reach retirement age? My mother-in-law lives with us, and I wouldn't have it any other way. She helps with raising our kids, and it's certainly better than paying to put them into a nursing home, as well as the cost of hiring a nanny. I think this is another trend that is also on the increase.
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