Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone

by Settersten, Richard; Ray, Barbara E.

  Another misperception about this generation is that they are afraid of commitment and are abandoning marriage. Marriage is definitely on hold for this generation, but it is delayed, not abandoned. The majority of young people eventually marry. They are just getting their ducks in a row before they do. It is in getting married and having children where we see the starkest divide between swimmers and treaders. Swimmers are delaying marriage and children, while treaders are often delaying marriage but not children. Children are a significant source of meaning and even salvation for many young people, but having a child too early becomes one of the costliest barriers to getting ahead—interrupting and often severing college plans and progress, and seriously restricting opportunities in the labor market.

  One frequently overlooked aspect of the delay in marriage is the role of friends. As marriage is delayed, friends are playing a bigger part for a longer time. Where once young people made critical life decisions with the help of their spouses, today they are more often consulting with their friends. Friends are an important source of contacts for jobs, networks, introductions, and just getting around in a new city. Indeed, our connections shape our destinies in ways both large and small. The people in our networks, where we sit within them, the network’s size and shape can affect everything from our job opportunities to our health. When networks are small, tight, and more exclusively family-based, as the networks of treaders often are, they can impede life chances and cement disadvantages. The much-maligned digital age might be a panacea for this narrow set of ties. While many tag this generation as loners addicted to video games, their online lives are hardly solitary. In fact, online social networking is an important tool for expanding the contacts and horizons of those who are treading. The portals of the digital world are open to everyone.

  Parents are playing an even larger and longer role in young adults’ lives. Indeed, strong and continued support from parents is often the biggest factor that separates those who swim from those who tread. Involved parents, and even the helicopter parents of media fame, it turns out, aren’t so bad after all—especially in contrast with parents who give no support at all. It’s far worse to have uninvolved parents than it is to have super-involved ones. Rather than a sign of weakness, involved parents provide young people with advantages, including advice, funds, a roof and a bed, and connections. It can be as simple as making sure that their daughter doesn’t take unnecessary classes in college or the bigger step of allowing her to move home after she graduates so that she can take her time in finding the right job. Parents of treaders are not necessarily uninvolved. Many of these parents simply believe that the paths they took are the right ones for their children, too. Even if their intentions are good, many lack the money, time, or connections to help their kids navigate the early-adult years in our high-stakes world. Between their young adulthood and their children’s, the world did an about-face. Rushing headlong into adulthood no longer makes sense and can put kids at risk.

  And then there is politics. We’ve all heard the story: This generation does not vote, they do not read a newspaper, they do not write to their elected officials, and they do not join community groups. The Obama election may just have reinvigorated this famously skeptical generation. Yet even here we see stark disparities—the twenty-three million young voters who went to the polls in 2008 were overwhelmingly the college-educated. These disparities are evident in all aspects of civic life, which raises serious concerns about entrenched inequalities and the fate of democracy. Voters typically vote with their own interests in mind. How will a country in which only the elite vote and participate manage to stay truly democratic?

  Finally, we offer some ideas and solutions that may help alleviate financial and other pressures on families during their children’s protracted path to independence. Our story is not just about privileged youth versus underprivileged youth—between those who have the luxury to use the transition to adulthood for exploration versus those who have limited opportunities, are lacking personal resources, or live in fragile circumstances. It is also the story of the middle class, which has now been left out in the cold institutionally, and which increasingly shoulders the burden of supporting young people in the face of dwindling public resources. Indeed, middle-class families are now, more than at any other time in recent history, offering extraordinary amounts of support to help their children get ahead—but they are unprepared to do so for such a long period of time and at such a high level. Families on the low end of middle income are particularly vulnerable—they have some, but not ample, resources, and their incomes are just enough to render them ineligible for government support, such as college grants or other supports. This is even more problematic in the wake of the recession, as middle-class families have found themselves on even shakier ground. They are no longer able to offer the same set of resources to their children they had once planned to.

  But Don’t Just Take Our Word for It

  Many authors, of course, have come before us writing about the Millennials, Generation X, Twixters, and the many other names this generation has been tagged with. We don’t want to add yet another ungrounded opinion to the heap. What we are adding instead is the culmination of eight years of research by a network of leading scholars who came together at the behest of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. The charge was to study how the twenties have changed and what that means for families and for the country.

  The MacArthur Foundation’s “network” model was designed with the understanding that the world is complex and that social change does not happen in a vacuum. It also takes into account that researchers in academia specialize. Psychologists do not often talk to economists, and sociologists do not often talk with neurologists, even though they are studying related facets of the same topic. The foundation’s network model brings scholars from different disciplines together in a “research without walls” format to drill down deeply and explore a specific topic from many different directions. As the number of “failure to launch” stories began to grow, and researchers began to wonder whether a new “period” of life was budding (much as adolescence had emerged a century earlier), the MacArthur Foundation recognized an opportunity to look more deeply at the changing passage to adulthood.

  The foundation funded a core group of twelve leading researchers from a variety of fields, including sociology, economics, psychology, and criminology. This group became the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy. The Network also invited other experts to participate so that special topics could be researched in greater depth. Most of the Network’s research has focused on young people between ages eighteen and thirty-four, a time span that encompasses all the traditional milestones of adulthood: leaving home, employment, education, marriage and relationships, childbearing. Because so much of the relevant action continues into the thirties, we deliberately took a long view of the process. We wanted to not only understand the early part, as young people make their way through these experiences, but also the later part, once they’ve come through them. How things shake out in this decade of life has a profound impact on the many decades of adult life that follow.

  The sociologists in the Network examined the broad changes in society that have impacted us all. Is it becoming more acceptable to live at home longer? If so, how did that happen? When social norms change, there is often an economic reason behind that change. Therefore, the economists in the Network, along with many of their colleagues, examined how the workforce, wages, cost of living, and other economic factors have influenced the path to adulthood. This group mined the large data sets that several government agencies collect to answer these questions, typically using advanced statistical methods to zero in on the main reasons for a particular outcome.

  The outcomes of these broad social and economic forces alter how people think and act, so the Network included psychologists to examine how young adults perceive these changes and the paths before them. Do they perceive a disti
nct order to achieving adulthood—and if so, how does it make them feel if their lives aren’t following that order? What exactly is adulthood in their estimation? The researchers compared their findings with other periods of life, wondering how the early twenties might differ from life in the thirties, or in midlife. Were they looking at an extended adolescence or a distinct period in the life course? They also designed a set of questions to insert in large ongoing surveys so that future scholars can begin to gain a fuller understanding of this important period of life.

  Not all young people are lucky enough to have close families and middle-class comforts. The criminologists and social welfare experts in the Network traced how the most vulnerable young people make their way into adulthood—including those who have disabilities or special needs, those who are aging out of foster care, and those who have prison records. They examined what happens when government programs that support these vulnerable youth suddenly diminish—and are often terminated—at age eighteen or twenty-one, and what it means for their transition into adulthood.

  An often overlooked aspect of this extended stretch to adulthood is what it means for our country’s civic culture. The Network took a broad look at the changing civic character of this generation, ranging from young adults’ trust in government and their fellow man, to their willingness to pitch in to solve problems, to their voting trends.

  Finally, the Network looked at how we might make the transition smoother for those who need the most help. As this “gap” time stretches out for an additional decade, parents are often called upon to shoulder the costs of supporting their young adult children, and our social institutions have been slow to catch up to this changing period. The Network collaborated with MDRC (formerly Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation), a renowned social policy research firm in New York, to help us contemplate and evaluate social programs that might improve the success of young adults.

  The Basis for Our Story

  To explore all of these issues, the Network tracked trends in the lives of young adults, sometimes over a full century, using nearly two dozen large and representative data sets. These data sets, many of which were commissioned or underwritten by research divisions of the federal government, are the nation’s best sources of information on young people and their families. These data sets range in size, design, and focus. Some surveys, such as the decennial census or other regular population supplements like the Current Population Surveys, capture the circumstances of millions of people on topics like education, work, and family status. Other surveys (such as High School and Beyond, Monitoring the Future, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) capture thousands of people but nonetheless provide comprehensive windows into households, families, and the lives of young people. Still others are smaller and more regional (such as the Youth Development Study or the Michigan Study of Adolescent and Adult Life Transitions), intensively tracking hundreds of young people and their families as they move through childhood, adolescence, and into adult life. Some of these are longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over time, while others are panel studies that occur regularly but ask the same questions of new people on each occasion. By simultaneously mining these and many other data sets, the research of the Network has produced a foundation for our story that is unparalleled in its breadth and depth.1

  To gain a more nuanced understanding of the results of these large surveys, the Network conducted nearly five hundred in-depth interviews with young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four from five sites across the country—San Diego, California; New York City, New York; Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota; Detroit, Michigan; and a community in rural Iowa. These sites were chosen for two primary reasons. First, it was important for the Network to sample in ways that would produce data of high scientific integrity, and members or associates of the Network had served as principal investigators on projects with sound samples in four of the five locations: the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in San Diego, the New York Second Generation Study in New York City, the Youth Development Study in Minneapolis–St. Paul, and the Michigan Study of Adolescent and Adult Life Transitions in Detroit.2 A sample of young people who had been interviewed on the phone or by mail for these larger studies were contacted by Network researchers and interviewed in person in taped conversations.

  Second, this particular combination of sites provided a highly diverse sample. This was critical for understanding the full range of young people’s experiences, especially because it allowed us to hear from men and women who were moving into adulthood in such diverse local settings—that bring with them unique opportunities and challenges for schooling, jobs, housing and cost of living, dating and marriage, and raising children. San Diego and New York City on the two coasts have large but very different immigrant populations. Minneapolis–St. Paul is a midsized, thriving city in the country’s midsection, and Detroit has been ground zero in the shift away from manufacturing to the knowledge economy. And, because the Network needed a site that would incorporate the experiences of young people who grow up in non-metropolitan small-town America, a new study was commissioned in a small community in Iowa. This study provided a lens for understanding what it is like to come of age in the many small farming and factory towns that pepper our country’s heartland. The social and economic fabric of these communities is radically different from that of the other sites.

  This constellation of research sites allows us to understand the experiences of young people from a wide array of ethnic and racial backgrounds, including immigrant youth. The ages of the young people in each of the samples are also such that we are able to examine the full process of moving into, through, and out of the twenties. The wide spectrum of topics covered in the nearly five hundred in-person interviews, which ranged between two and four hours, also provides a textured and multifaceted look at early-adult life, including living situations, education, employment, the formation of families, military service, civic participation and politics, the justice system, self-identity, and the future.

  Throughout the book, you will hear the voices of these young people and follow their stories. (Their names have been changed to protect their identities.) They will provide a firsthand view into the successes and struggles that young people are experiencing as they make their way into adult life. Facts and quantitative trends are important, but it is the lives of the young people that make these facts come alive.

  The Future Demands Our Attention

  Not Quite Adults brings all of this together in the first comprehensive and in-depth look at the dramatic changes to this period of life. More important, it brings the forgotten majority into focus and shows how sharply the destinies of young adults today are diverging, and what we might do about it. Some might ask, What’s so new about that? Some kids make it, others don’t. But what’s different today is that the stakes on all fronts are much higher. Poor judgments and small mistakes on the road to adulthood are all substantially more perilous than they were just a decade ago. In an increasingly winner-takes-all society, there is little room for missteps. With missteps, the opportunity to succeed—the bedrock of America—fades. The result: a world that opens up widely to some while narrowing for others, with a shrinking middle in between.

  The tale of this generation and its diverging destinies is one that should concern us all. For the swimmers, the problem is that as the first step on the path to adulthood is delayed, all of the steps that follow are also delayed. When young adults take longer to gain an education, the job search is delayed. When they take longer to find the perfect job, their relationships are often on hold. Although taking care in each of these steps is by itself a commendable approach in a high-stakes world, there is the danger of taking too long to assemble the package. For society’s sake, there is such a thing as waiting too long. Take marriage. Long delays in walking down the aisle mean fewer children, and fewer children mean there are more grandparents than grandchildren—never good for an economy.

&n
bsp; Behind the longer passage to adulthood is another problem. The search for the best degree, the ideal job, the perfect mate all hint at a growing pattern among young people today: They live in a world of elevated expectations. This does not mean they are spoiled or coddled; it simply means they have been raised to believe in themselves. But couple that strong self-esteem with a society that cherishes only winners, and there begins the collision course. Not everyone can be a winner. Expectations for a stellar life can all too easily lead to disappointment, if not outright paralysis in moving ahead.

  These high expectations are not entirely of this generation’s own making. Parents, teachers, other adults, and society have all promoted these expectations. Parents in particular realize the need in this competitive, shrinking world for their children to shine brighter than the rest. Yet parents have paid, often dearly as we’ll show, for the efforts they’ve made to boost their children’s chances. These anxious efforts have created an arms race that leaves parents constantly scrambling to measure up. It is a race that has them buying homes they can barely afford in better school districts and commuting long hours to ever-more-demanding jobs. They do it so they can give their children a shot at the top tier. These often extreme efforts are costly for families in terms of time and money, leaving many at financial risk, and even more so in hard economic times like these. It is a race, as we show, that is unsustainable.