This article was sent to me a while ago and I have just gotten around to having a read of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/ma...me&ref=general

My answer would be basically that,
A. Either society is changing dramatically and adult hood is now reached in different ways, which means that marriage and kids are becoming less important. Divorce is easier and much more common etc.

or,

B. that the economic situation over the last 30 years has had a massive impact. Wages have stayed relatively stable whilst house prices and the cost of living in general has increased. This means that surviving on a single wage is much harder than it was previously, therefore people stay with their parents longer and get married and have kids later.

Also, we live longer and therefore all the stages of life should be longer as well.
If you were born in 1930 (and therefore 30 years old in 1960 like the example in the article), your life expectancy would have been only 58 and 61 years for men and women respectively.
If you were born in 1970, you could expect to live more than 10 years longer, so makes sense to postpone adulthood for some years as well.

I pretty much agree that its your "B" answer, with this addition: The economic changes have spawned social changes, particularly in our spending habits.

Look at the amount of "stuff" we all have now. We can buy a flat-screen TV, iPhones, Air Conditioning, etc, etc without leaving us destitute.

In the past, people just got by - they had the necessities. Not that their life was any less fulfilling.

Kids moving out nowadays take a greater financial step downwards, so instead they stay home longer.

My kids playroom is so full of toys its ridiculous. They get toys and stuff all year round. Now at Christmas we are stumped for what to buy, as they have more than they need. It'll be interesting when they are older (prob known as Generation Y + 3 or 4)

People are more fussy when it comes to partners, I think, so spend longer looking for the perfect match and I see a lot of "changing horses during the race", i.e. someone switches to someone new that they perceive to be "better" while still not quite having let go of the previous relationship - it's only happened to me twice but boy did it hurt, other friends seem to collect guys who do this. I feel I can manage on my own quite well, for example, and really don't want to be in a relationship that will potentially leave me out of pocket emotionally and financially due to my devoting time and energy to someone who will, due to the aforementioned horse changing, run off with someone else.

There is still pressure on women to do the whole "get married and have kids" thing before they are thirty but it has thankfully eased up a bit. It's no longer the be all and end all of things, although I have to say that my friends in the UK are getting married and having kids much earlier than their Swiss counterparts... Here you probably work out what it costs, work out how many exotic holidays it would buy you and just skip the whole thing...

I can only speak for males, but I think adolescence has gotten longer and longer over the years. Things like lads mags, games consoles, clubbing, soft drugs, binge drinking, gadgets and other distractions allow men to be children for longer, spending what disposable income they have on that instead of saving, buying property and settling down into a more domestic enviroment.

John Eldredge & Tomcat agree with PlantHead.

Plus there is this constant notion of "missing out". If you look at men's mags, a lot of the titles are about getting the perfect suit, the perfect abs, the perfect woman, the perfect car, like life was a series of boxes to tick, where you don't really design the box yourself. So if you haven't ticked the boxes as predefined by "standard cool guy", you feel short-changed.

Then there's the responsibility-phobia. My generation wants all the rights, none of the responsibilities. Criticism is like the world crumbling, the notion of not being able to "shoot for the stars" is unheard of. We are too busy trying to "live the dream" to realise when it's time to wake up and smell the coffee...

I'm curious to know how they arrived at those five things quantifying "becoming an adult."

Completing school? What school? Highschool or University or simply making the transition from "learning" toward "doing" (apprentice to journeyman)?

Also, I'm curious as to which country those sociologists hail... those definitions seem extremely "western" and "new world" in that a lot of the "traditional" Italian families - as one example - I knew (even in the US) the sons stay at home and help the family financially until they get married.


Even so, I think some have hit it squarely on the financial head. I think a lot of "post feminism" children grew up with a lot more than our parents had growing up and are less likely to move out before they can maintain the same level of lifestyle that they had while growing up.

Our parents maybe didn't have much growing up so they made sure we had better childhood, including access to higher education. (By "our" I mean that VERY loosely because mine sure were not like this, but for many of my peers, it was so).

I think the big thing there that is "wrong" is that financial independence bit. Somewhere along the line someone got into their head that it is wrong for families to be financially interdependant and mutually supportive. I'd be curious to see someone do a study to pinpoint were exactly that shift was from offspring living at home until they get married and have kids (thus "needing" their own space) to instead being "ok junior, now you're 18 (or finished university) and should be able to make it on your own."

I believe it's because people don't like to suffer or struggle or strive any more. My parents' generation bought a house, and the mortgage payments meant that they couldn't really afford anything else. Furniture came slowly, holidays stopped for a couple of years etc etc.

Nowadays people want to buy a house, kit it out with expensive furniture, put in a posh kitchen and bathroom full of gadgets, then shoot off to the beach for two weeks to recover from the buying experience.

So house prices aren't a factor on their own, it's wanting everything at once.

For me it is more A than B. Women do not only work for the money, but because it is today commonly accepted that they have the same right to choose a profession the same way men do. This has little to do with the house price and a lot with the changes in society.

Marriage. My parents married in the middle of the 60s. Before marriage, they were not able and allowed to stay together - no joint vacations, "WG"s or many possibilities to meet outside of work. I am not surprised that young people would faster marry under those circumstances - they still do today in countries with different cultural values.

Leaving school, getting kids: I studied as fast as it is possible in my country: I was 25 when I graduated after four years of uni (that was before the 3 year bachelor/ 5 year masters), one year of service and highschool. The statistics of these milestones obviously does not mention that today easily three times as many kids go to university as in the 1960s... so you obviously stay longer at school and have kids later.

It is an interesting point as to whether the 5 stages do actually constitute maturity.
I would have added, knowing someone who has died (family member?), experienced a loss of ego/confidence (ie getting fired/dumped/cheated on), been in some sort of serious trouble (police, debt, at work)
These are all things that have lead me to a much greater maturity/ emotional baggage and I imagine there are many more.

From the bloke side there is much less pressure to get married. Women still seem to feel that marriage is the ultimate aim but I think for me and my mates once you were living with a girl and had been for a long time then that was enough. Unless religion got in the way, most of my mates weren't really bothered about marriage and didn't see what difference it would make....a mortgage on the other hand seems to be much more of a relationship commitment than marriage could ever be.
This is a reflection on society and the baby boomers I would say, all those hippies with their loose morals and free love.

Yeah... from the times when marriage was still something (and not only Muslims were allowed to stone people...):

13 If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her 14 and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, "I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity," 15 then the girl's father and mother shall bring proof that she was a virgin to the town elders at the gate. 16 The girl's father will say to the elders, "I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. 17 Now he has slandered her and said, 'I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.' But here is the proof of my daughter's virginity." Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18 and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19 They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver [b] and give them to the girl's father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.
20 If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house. You must purge the evil from among you.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...22&version=NIV

@ Treverus

I am actually glad they are not virgins when they get married anymore...

I mean has anyone been with a virgin??'

"and now for my talent part..."

On other things..

A serious thread by planthead??' The world is coming to an end now...

Transition to adulthood: Making responsible decisions and taking responsibility for your actions.

Those 5 listed criteria are outdated, a bit like bibical stories.

I'm from India and this article made for really interesting reading. But I couldn't put a sense of connect between what the article describes as "emerging adulthood" and what I (or friends from my generation) went thru while growing up in our early twenties. There were no "lads mags, games consoles, clubbing, soft drugs, binge drinking, gadgets and other distractions" as Castro so succinctly puts it across. Mind you, this was just 8-10 years ago. The emphasis back then was on landing a good job immediately after graduating from university, putting aside a good chunk of your monthly net-in-hand income towards savings for buying an apartment, picking up skills to round up your personality, etc. Nowhere was there any attraction towards indulging in the sort of activities described by Castro.

I think a major reason for this was the realisation that as a developing 3rd world country, we simply couldn't afford to waste our time indulging in any of the above activities. Given the fierce competition in India at the academic and professional level (just to give an example, the year I enrolled into B-School, 150,000 students gave the B-School common entrance exam, out of which around 4000 were finally accepted for a full-time 2 year MBA in B-Schools thruout India), spending our time playing computer games, binge drinking, etc. would only have served to put us right at the back of the chasing pack. And this was all about aspiring to a better quality of life than what was prevalent back then.

However, when I look at the current crop of 18-23 year olds in India, they seem to be slowly and invariably drifting towards the same "past-times" that Castro mentioned of. This has been one of the side effects of enjoying 10 years of good economic growth. The last 10 years have also altered beyond change the social and cultural fabric in the country (and not for the good, often). Todays kids think that they can indulge in sloth and still make up for it at the end of the day, because the economy is booming and there is something in it for everyone (or so it seems).

By the parameters listed in the article, I have completed 60% of the transition to "adulthood" with "finding a partner" and "having a child" as the only remaining items. However financially independent is a very tricky term and is highly subjective. What might be taken as financially independent for someone might not even come close for me.

Maybe "emerging adulthood" is a luxury enjoyed only by the developed/western countries? I would certainly tend to think so.

I suspect the numbers of people completing the milestones would dramatically increase if you took marriage of the list & replaced it with living together.
In which case getting to adulthood is not happening later; just different.

Personally, I am still in a phase where I am passing through different countries and making my own impressions.

As long as I can afford to have this freedom I will enjoy it, because a lot of people are bound to their house, own family, bad economic situation etc.

One day I will find a place to settle down, maybe, hehe.

But right now, I am on the Run.

It is for sure easier to adapt to economic situations or pursue other challenges If you really havent much to loose.

I'd say that the biggest "hurdle" is more the "get kids" milestone. 1960 was the year the anti baby pill was first introduced and not widely available yet. I am not surprised that they had more babies and at earlier ages back then... so I would say besides social changes might this be one of the most influencial inventions since then.