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."
In Poland with little available land (there was not generous government grabbing the land from Indian tribes and making free gifts to the farmers) when the son/sons grew up, they were taking over the farm and old parents were retired (helping a little and not being in charge anymore). If farmers had only daughters the sons in laws were taking them in. What could be new was the separate new house for the newly wed on the same land.
I heard about the family squabbles from peasant friends - ambitious sons too eager to retire still able-bodied fathers.
This system led to the smaller and smaller plots so the surplus men were migrating to the cities or to America. Still among the city people the grandparents were (and still are) valuable assets as providers of childcare.
I am 24, and I just bought a house.
No way am I ever going back to live with the parents. In fact, chances are better (albeit slim) that they will be living with me and the wife sooner...in about 30 years....
Grandparents could be very useful in homeschooling!
Yeah sure. You must have read all these stories in the Bible how the fathers kicks out his sons out, once they reach magical 18 years age. Prodigal sons or or not.
"6000+ years" ?! "Nuclear family" came into being in the nuclear age for a reason.
I guess you already know your you're that smart though?
I do write in complete sentences in formal publications. Bad grammar and spelling errors hurt your credibility. Being "smart" is only half the equation. You must diligently apply your intelligence if it is to be of any value. Many people achieve "top of the class" distinction because they simply worked harder than others in the same situation. Others may have been "smarter", but failed to apply it.
LOL, reminds me of Back To School when Rodney Dangerfield is attending the business class, where the professor is talking about the economics of building a factory, and Rodney ridicules him:
Professor:
You'll see the final bottom line requires the factoring in of not just the material and construction costs but also the architects' fees and the cost of land servicing.
Melon:
Oh, you left out a bunch of stuff.
Professor:
Oh, really? Like what, for instance?
Melon:
First of all, you have to grease the local politicians for the sudden zoning problems that always come up. Then there's the kickbacks to the carpenters. And if you plan on using any cement in this building I'm sure the Teamsters would like to have a little chat with you, and that'll cost you. Don't forget a little something for the building inspectors. There's the long-term costs, such as waste disposal. I don't know if you're familiar with who runs that business but I assure you it's not the Boy Scouts.
Aha, so now ya'll is sayin' you weren't so smart and ya gonna git uppity and say yous a hod worker? Either yous real smart or real stoopid.
Being statistics and metrics oriented, I'd love to know, about the subpopulation in question:
* How many worked when they were under 18 and if so, doing what?
* How many worked during college / including taking one or more quarters off per year to work, and if so, doing what?
* How many got credit cards when they turned 18?
;)
One of the funniest screenplays EVER. :-)
As a DINK by happenstance past my ideal age for fatherhood (but still not TOO old for it) I would have to say, that, if we do end up having kids, they are going to be micromanaged so intensely in terms of fiscal responsibility and forward planning, that either they'll be mini versions of Rich Dad when they get out of college, or, they'll hate us so much they'd never want to return! :=)
I wonder if the freemarketeers understand this? I guess some of them don't (these are blinded by the false ideology) and others do (those use the ideology as a smoke screen for their con-job on the society).
Initially, the shark like Boomers discrminated against older workers. Boomers, generally, have a level of street smarts and cunning that was lacking in most of those born prior to 1945. Then, once the WW2 and Korean War generation started to retire in droves (I'll grant that a few of the latter still hold out ...) the Boomers turned on the younger generations. Just my own observations, from a management perspective, in a Fortune 500.
Or, insist that they work seasonally during college. I took 4 -1/2 years to get my undergrad degree, and worked a total of 6 quarters during that time. As soon as I had my high school degree, I became a job shopper / contractor in high tech companies, starting out with total grunt work and with the combination of constantly accumulating book knowledge and work experience, built my resume. By the time I got out of college, I already had real professional experience under my belt. Of course, going for ROTC or even going in for 2 then school after that also works quite well. Same general idea ...
Does the shop steward know you're playing with his PC?
Never understood why people want their kids to leave. Yeah, I know that they deserve their own lives & all. I love mine & enjoy their company. I have 3 20-somethings. Two living on their own, one still home. The one still home pays rent, does his own laundry, and helps out w/ care for his 8 year-old brother and his 95 year old grandfather.. My other 2 still come by often, one does all the lawn care & the other is the official chaffuer for his grandfather. And I try to send them home w/ care packages as often as possible.
Honestly, talking to some of my friends, I wonder why they had kids at all. Seems like most of them can't wait to get rid of them. I have tried to enjoy my boys, at all ages. (Though housebroken and sleeping though the night made the whole process so much easier!!)
Same here. I went to college at 16, moved back home briefly afterwards at 20, then went out on my own 6 mos later and never moved back.
And it wasn't because of partying, sex etc - I just HATE being dependent on anyone and can't tolerate having people checking on me every hour and snooping around in my stuff. My parents still treated me like I was 10 yrs old when I was there, even though I was working, doing chores, paying rent to them, etc.
And even though I was really poor for awhile and living in a basement that flooded when it rained so I had to keep my stuff up off the floor I was happy being on my own.
I love my parents but during that brief period of time I lived with them after school I couldn't even go to the mall without them bugging the hell out of me about it (and I went just to get out of the house, not to shop!!).
LQ
Alcoholics teaching sobriety, academic dropouts teaching procrastination as a lifestyle; the Clinton Effect marches on...
There's a 16 year-old middle-school dropout down the street who makes more than anyone in the neighborhood, if he ain't wearin' it, it's on his Escalade.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You're right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In a cracked cup, an' all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL: They won't!
Spoiled. With no end in sight.
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