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.

  The role of friends should not be underestimated. The stronger our ties to friends, the more likely they will help us out in a crisis (and we them), be sounding boards to our major decisions, and smooth life’s bumps. The wider our network of friends, the more likely we are to meet or hear about a future employer or another valuable connection, to expand our views or interests, and to encounter new opportunities. In old age, friends often fill the role of a spouse who has died, preventing us from becoming socially isolated and alone, and, in doing so, keeping us healthy and happy longer. Ultimately, these close personal connections increase our trust in our fellow man and encourage us to cooperate on larger efforts that may not only benefit us directly but also contribute to the greater good. Friends, it turns out, can even help us ward off the common cold.

  Friendship also has a dark side, however. Friends can shape our tendency to drink or eat too much, to abandon exercise, or to take too many risks or surround ourselves with too many negative influences. Among young women, friendships can be a format for talking ceaselessly about problems, to the point that some women become clinically depressed as a result. More starkly, three-fourths of murders are committed by someone we know. It is this darker side of friendships that has caught the interest of researchers studying social networks and their impact on our lives in ways both big and small.

  In the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Harvard sociologist Nicholas Christakis and University of San Diego political scientist James Fowler find that the size of our social network and our position in it matter more in the end than race, class, gender, or education in whether we get ahead or fall behind. Christakis and Fowler call this “positional” inequality, and in a nutshell it means that people with many ties become better connected to jobs, information, healthy behaviors, and income. Not so surprising to anyone who has ever networked to get a job. But what is truly remarkable is the independent role that friends play in shaping our positions in life—beyond standard influences like income, education, or occupational status. Those with fewer friends or friends who are less connected get left farther and farther behind. “Life,” as the Chinese philosopher Tehyi Hsieh has said, “is partly what we make it, and partly what is made by the friends whom we choose.”

  Young adulthood is the prime time for forging these increasingly critical networks. As we age, the core group of people we can call on to discuss important matters shrinks. Making friends and connecting with others during this time of life might just set the stage for a healthier and more contented future life. Of course it could just as easily set the stage for an unhappier, unhealthier, and less contented life. Our friendships help seal our fates.

  Communities of Like Minds

  As school is extended and marriage and parenting are delayed, friends have become more prominent, and for a longer time, in the lives of young people. Therefore, the role of social networks has gained more importance. In the not-so-distant past, some of life’s biggest decisions were made across the dinner table from a spouse. Today, those decisions are more often being made in the company of friends, across the table in a café. To get a handle on this change, consider this. In 1980, about 40 percent of twenty-somethings were married between ages twenty and twenty-four. Today, half as many young adults are married at that age.1 Likewise, the number of young people living on their own or with roommates, and not with their parents, has skyrocketed. In 1970, only about 16 percent of young adults ages twenty through twenty-nine were never married and living on their own. Today, the figure has just about doubled.2 As the sitcoms have so aptly recorded with each passing decade, we’ve moved from Father Knows Best to All in the Family to Friends, Sex and the City, and Entourage.

  Craig, a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker working on his master’s degree, captures this shift in his description of a perfect weekend. “I’d play sports,” he says, “go out to drink some beers, maybe go out to dance, have a fun time. Sunday I get up at eight in the morning and I go to play baseball till like one o’clock. That’s basically my free time. Since I got into grad school, I picked up sailing, surfing, golfing. Recently I’ve been going golfing almost every day.” No wife, no children, no obligations other than graduate school. Until the 1980s, there would have been all three. The median age when women have their first child has risen dramatically over the past few decades, and the share of women who are childless at age thirty has risen significantly as well. Among those who turned thirty in 1984, only about 15 to 18 percent of women of all racial and ethnic groups were childless. In 2000, nearly 50 percent of white women and 25 percent of black and Hispanic women were childless at age thirty. Just twenty years ago, a man like Craig would be spending his weekends with his wife and kids. Instead, Craig hangs out with his friends.

  Friends take center stage for other reasons as well. Many young adults have also just come out of one of the most intensely social periods of life, especially if they were in college or the military. Dorms, platoons, and foxholes—all these factors contribute to bonding and strong friendships. Young adults are also more mobile. Unencumbered by family and responsibilities, they can pack up and move across country or to new cities for jobs and a new start in life. Once there, they must make an effort to meet new people—and they do.

  To Mia, her loose networks of friends work perfectly for her at this time in her life. At twenty-eight, her work as a marine biologist has taken her from Hawaii to Atlanta with several stops in between. She meets new friends wherever she goes, and the casualness of these friendships allows her to pack up and go without serious tugs of regret when a new job demands she relocate. “This may sound callous,” she says, “but if I wanted to pick up and move, I would leave these friends behind. We would remain in touch, I’m sure, but I like the ability to make my decisions and not have those decisions uproot someone else.” It also helps that in this day of social networking, email, and Twitter, Mia can more easily maintain her friendships.

  The casualness of these friendships will be an important characteristic of her expanding network, and in that casualness is an important boost to her life chances. With every move and every new set of friends, Mia is enlarging the circle of people she can call on for advice, job leads, and dates. Her very mobility is what both expands her network and keeps it loose and wide. Although Americans of all ages who remain in their hometowns or neighborhoods are more likely than those who have left to say they have more local friends, those who have left say they have a broader social network.3 As we show later, broader networks are an important factor that distinguishes those who swim and those who tread as they move into adulthood.

  As young adults settle into new cities or new neighborhoods in their hometowns, they seek new communities of like minds. Ethan Watters chronicled these new “families” in his recent book Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment. Groups of friends band together against the anonymity of new lives in strange cities. They fill in for family during holidays. They host parties and share meals. They twitter, they e-vite, they go on vacation together. Members may come and go with jobs or relocations, expanding or contracting the “tribe,” but its existence is constant. Everyone in the tribe has a role: Some lead, others follow, some are needy, some are impatient, some are embarrassing, others are controlling. In short, the tribe is family.

  Families of origin remain very important to young adults, especially their relationships with parents. But these family relationships naturally change as children leave home and begin to live independently. In our interviews, we heard continuously from young adults about how important their parents, siblings, and other family members are to them. They regularly seek their advice. They talk to their parents often, even daily, and their sisters and brothers are a constant presence in their lives. If they live in the same town or city as their families, they go home regularly for family dinners or even to do the laundry. In fact, most young adult children are quick to describe their parents as close o
r even best friends. But there are some topics that are better suited for friends than for family, even if family relationships are close. When we ask young people what they talk about with their parents, for example, they are often quick to say “everything but sex,” and to then mention other personal matters that are more likely to be shared in their romantic relationships or with friends.

  “When something big is on the line,” says Charlie, the twenty-two-year-old who is just starting out in Ball State University in Indiana, “friends will be there for you. There’s been many times when I have a problem and I’ll call my friends before my dad or family. It’s always better to get a view of a peer, and you won’t be judged by a friend, unlike my dad. Friends truly are lifesavers in many cases.”

  “Friends are definitely taking the place of family in major ways,” says Anna, who works at Twentieth Century–Fox. She moved to Hollywood as a twenty-two-year-old straight out of college, leaving behind friends and family to strike out on her own. She made friends quickly, as many young people do when they’re in a new city. She met some people at her job, her roommate had a set of friends, and before she knew it, she had a close group of a dozen friends she calls on for big and small decisions alike.

  “When you work seventy hours a week, they become a huge part of your life,” Anna says. Like Watters’s tribe, Anna and her friends create a constantly shifting web of support. “Since I’m not near my parents now and not relying on them for smaller things, I do rely on friends more in ways that my family might provide. We pick each other up at the airport—that’s totally a spouse thing. When I was sick with a kidney infection, my friend took me to the emergency room. You just do the things when you can. If you have a job, you’re not going to cut out early to do something, but you find a person who has a schedule that will allow them to help out. A friend of mine who is writing a book—she took me to the airport at a weird hour.”

  In many ways, Anna and her friends are creating communities and networks exactly like those that Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community claims have all but died. Although odds are that Anna doesn’t know her immediate neighbor across the street, which Putnam argues is at the crux of community’s demise, Anna and her friends are pitching in for their “neighbors” even though those neighbors are halfway across the city and they only recently met one another. They are forming communities based not on proximity, but on like-mindedness. Anna and her friends share the same ideals and goals for life. They are in the creative world of Hollywood, struggling to get recognized in a competitive field. Most of them are from similar backgrounds, with college degrees and parents who were solidly middle class. They probably even share the same political ideals. And the community they’ve formed isn’t limited to just Los Angeles. Today more likely than not, their community stretches far beyond Los Angeles to friends and friends of friends who live in Indiana, New York, and all the way to Hong Kong.

  Not all young adults, however, have these close, interdependent friendships. Instead, they continue to rely largely on their immediate families for support and networking. This can be detrimental because tight-knit family ties are not likely to open as many new opportunities as are broad and loose networks of acquaintances.4

  Indeed, the degree to which individuals rely on their families versus friends and acquaintances for social support has been an enduring distinction between the working class and the middle and upper classes. The working class has traditionally relied more singularly on kin for social support than the middle and upper classes.5 This does not mean that young adults of greater means are quick to abandon their families. Families continue to offer support for all young adults today, and that support remains important. What it does mean is that swimmers more often combine this family support with other kinds of contacts, ranging from dear friends to mere acquaintances. They have wider networks. This pattern of distinction between working-class and middle- and upper-class individuals holds whether class is defined by occupational prestige or by income or level of education. The reason for the narrower social base of treaders stems from a broad set of complex forces that land individuals in their status. However, as we show, our social networks determine a lot more than what we do on a Saturday night.

  Choose Your Friends Wisely

  The communities of like minds that Anna and others have forged are at the heart of the social networks that Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler talk about in Connected. Anna’s core friends have other friends that she may or may not know. Their friends have friends. Those friends of friends have friends. These three degrees of separation will become the sphere of influence in Anna’s life. According to Christakis and Fowler, it is the friends of friends of friends who will be more integral in connecting Anna to the job leads and other important connections in life than her immediate, core set of friends. After all, her core set of friends are all in the same boat, but if they each have five additional friends, and those friends have five more friends, then Anna’s circle of contacts for potential jobs, advice, and opportunities grows exponentially. Depending on her level of sociability, she may be at the heart of a broad network of friends and acquaintances or she may be at the periphery. If she’s at the heart of it, she will personally know more friends of friends because she will straddle wider groups. If she’s at the periphery, she may just stick to a core set of friends and never be introduced to those at the far reaches of the network. Her position within the network will impact its eventual reach.

  These social networks—and their importance to young adults’ prospects—get to the heart of where destinies diverge between swimmers and treaders. If a person’s friends are gangbangers and drug dealers, for example, his or her network quickly becomes a liability rather than a support net. Mariela, for example, fell in with a wrong crowd early in life. “I was the black sheep of my high school,” she says. “Everybody knew who I was, but it wasn’t a good reputation, you know?” Her reputation stemmed from the company she kept, “because I hung out with a bad crowd, like the gangsters and all that.” Mariela graduated early from high school and went to work at KFC. She would later enroll in a technical course for training as a medical assistant. But even then, she says, “I just couldn’t get away. You only saw people you knew. I fell right back into it.” She was having difficulty, in other words, extricating herself from her own, in this case negative, social network. She had no bridges to other, more positive networks.

  Mariela was nineteen when her thirty-year-old then-boyfriend proposed to her. A girlfriend at work had introduced the two of them, and they’d dated for about a year. He was living in a halfway house at the time, working for minimum wage. Mariela had a young daughter from a one-night stand and she briefly considered accepting his proposal, because she thought no one else would be willing to love her and her child. However, shortly after he proposed, a member of the crew was shot and killed at age thirty-three after spending much of his adult life in the gang. This was a turning point for Mariela, who suddenly saw her future laid out bare before her. She knew if she didn’t leave now, she’d end up in a dead end, either literally or figuratively. She extricated herself by giving her parents temporary custody of her daughter and joining the navy at age twenty. Within a few months she met her future husband, whom she married right after her twenty-first birthday. The navy, for Mariela, became a bridge to a different social network of both adults and peers.

  Friendship can be viewed as a personal choice, freely entered into, but it is formed in particular social, economic, and cultural circumstances, and this has a very significant impact on the people we meet. “If people’s main support and connection are with peers who do not have positive friends,” says Network chair Frank Furstenberg, who as a sociologist has studied the effects of neighborhoods and friends on the life course, “they’re likely to miss out on important supports in the form of connections or information about moving into conventional adult roles. So they can’t provide the resources that more positive
peers can in bridging a move into a conventional social role.” These bridging ties are often the less intimate personal relationships. They are the wide network that people cultivate as they move through life—acquaintances, co-workers, referrals. Young adults who are treading water often lack these broader networks, as do their parents.

  Law school student Aviva says of some of her elite classmates at Cornell, “Their father calls up an acquaintance and says ‘Hey, I’m gonna take you out to dinner. We’ll be talking about my son’s future job.’ ” The reach of these parents is integral in expanding the horizons of their children, finding them summer jobs or internships, and exposing them to new ideas and ways of living. The fathers of Aviva’s friends probably don’t personally know each of these contacts, but they are able to call on them because their social networks give them ready access to others. Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, who has studied weak and tight ties, finds that most people land their jobs not through close friends but from people they had talked to only occasionally or even rarely.

  Randy, in his late twenties and still single, is slowly realizing the value of a wide network of contacts. He grew up in a middle-class suburban subdivision outside Detroit. As a kid, he was very active in sports. “There must have been thirty or forty kids within three blocks of my house growing up,” he says. “All within a six- or seven-year age difference. With a front yard like ours, we’d have full-fledged baseball games, football games, basketball games.” He continues to form friendships based around sports, playing softball and soccer in the summers and moving the competition indoors in the winter. Now five years out of college, he is working as a journalist back in his hometown of Detroit and sharing a rented home with several guys.