Even if some traditional milestones are never reached, one thing is clear: Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than ever.
And then, while writing a long article about this supposedly new "emerging adulthood" stage of life, freelance science reporter Robin Marantz Henig fails to provide any solid evidence beyond a few anecdotes and interviews with a single researcher, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett.
Henig discusses G. Stanley Hall and his 1903 work Adolescence as a sort of intellectual history, to note that Arnett isn't the first to try to assert a new stage of life. She does so without noting the irony: Hall's adolescent age included a substantial part of Arnett's emerging adulthood.
Henig's a talented writer, and I wish she had done more to discuss what evidence exists as opposed to the conclusory quotations she draws from Arnett and a friendly skeptic, Richard Lerner.
But wait: for those five transitions Henig mentions (finishing school, moving away, getting a job, pair-bonding, having kids), there should be a way to test Henig's claim. Unfortunately, like so many others, she sets her benchmark in the immediate post-WW2 years, when early marriage and low childlessness helped define the Baby Boom. I wish I had time to spend this week checking the central tendency measures for those transitions. But I suspect the picture is more complicated than Henig (or Arnett) asserted.
Incidentally, my older child is going through one of those transitions this week, as she starts college in Pennsylvania. I read articles like Henig's, or ones about helicopter parents, and shake my head. My daughter is more than ready to go.
Hi Sherman! You may want to check out the article I co-authored a few years back – we used census data to make exactly that point, as well as noting the very different experiences of African American young people.
Stanger-Ross, Jordan, Collins, Christina, & Stern, Mark J. Falling Far from the Tree: Transitions to Adulthood and the Social History of Twentieth-Century America. Social Science History – Volume 29, Number 4, Winter 2005, pp. 625-648.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to even suspect that this article might have been written based on a press release intended to promote that specific author’s work. No, journalists have never used (or been used by) press releases. [snark off]
I’d be hard pressed to imagine that anything in that story would fail to describe my generation … and I am older than you are.