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.

  When Randy was growing up, he did not realize that his subdivision carried a stigma. Families in the wealthier subdivisions looked down on the kids from Randy’s neighborhood, and everyone talked about how much trouble they caused. Through sports, he was able to develop critical bridging ties and as a result he avoided being tagged a troublemaker. “I was an athlete,” he says, “so a lot of those kids talked to me.” That was not the case for his neighborhood pals. The guys from the wealthier subdivision “wouldn’t talk to them because they were from the neighborhood,” he remembers.

  Randy continued to expand his network after college, even as he continued to live in the “trouble” neighborhood. While working as a reporter on the local paper, he covered a community group for young adults. “I thought this might be interesting,” he said, “so I called the guy in charge of it. And I started making friends and going every now and then.” His connections there would eventually lead him to the comfortable home he is currently renting, with the option to buy.

  Despite his early start on the wrong side of town, Randy managed to use sports to broaden his horizons, and he was not afraid to try new things, like writing about the community group. While Aviva’s friends had parents who made sure their children were exposed to potential connections, or who deliberately intervened on their behalf to set them up in life, Randy managed to do it for himself through a growing network of friends and acquaintances, first through baseball and soccer, and later through work.

  Young adults who are forging ahead with a solid education and a good job are often distinguished by a wide circle of friends. Ben, the Chicago lawyer, for example, stays in touch with a diverse and widespread circle of friends from both college and high school. “My friends are scattered to the four corners of the earth, but I have a good network of people who come to me with their problems and I go to them with my problems. I also have a tight network here at work as well.” A friend from high school recently moved to Chicago from New York, and Ben helped him get settled and even provided him with a few job leads. Likewise Edgar, a thirty-four-year-old African American man who went to a historically black college, has an expansive network of fraternity brothers spread around the country. Unhappy in his job and looking to move on, he put out feelers to his friends, who in turn spread the word. He was interviewing for new positions within a month.

  On the other hand, Kelly’s circle is small and much more confined. At age twenty-nine, she is the single mother of three young children. She is unemployed and is reluctantly living with her mother in St. Paul. Kelly struggles to find work and day care for her children, and because she does not have a broad network of friends and acquaintances, she finds jobs through the want ads. She is at risk of sinking deeper into poverty. While many other factors influence her situation, she is nevertheless orbiting in a small, insular world, and as a result is less aware of opportunities that might help her to find better child care or learn about job-training options or otherwise broaden her horizons.

  Kelly’s preponderance of tight-knit ties and the lack of loose ties also increase her risk of poverty. Low-income families are more inclined to rely on close kinship ties for support, limiting their network of information and resources to those they know, and to those in similar circumstances.6 Certain communities or neighborhoods can be too insular as well. Even the quintessential American small town can be hamstrung by its hallmark close ties. Although people in small towns watch out for one another, pitch in after tragedies, and foster a solid sense of “us,” the counterpoint to these close ties is that a person’s reputation precedes him or her. If a person is born on the “wrong side of the tracks,” getting ahead in life becomes difficult precisely because of these intimate, tight connections. One’s reputation is everything, and a misstep can lead to being cast out of the “in” crowd and the job leads, offers, and other privileges of status, sometimes for generations.

  “More and more poverty scholars are thinking about the ways in which persistent poverty is perpetuated because the poor are isolated,” says Cynthia Duncan, director of the Carsey Institute, a research think tank focused on rural policy. “Those who are isolated are trapped in small, homogeneous, often family-based social worlds where they find emotional support but few connections to a larger world of opportunity. Their ideas about who they are, what they can become, and where they fit—their cultural tool kit, as sociologist Ann Swidler has described it—has been shaped by these immediate kin and friends who are in the same disadvantaged circumstances. Opportunity requires connections to a wider world that can expand that tool kit.”

  As one young Iowan we interviewed says of her childhood, “You’ve always known from growing up whose parents had money, and … if you were popular or not, or if the teachers would like you, or if you got into swing choir, or if you got into National Honor Society. I mean, you kind of knew.”

  Which comes first, the poverty or the limited network, is a complicated question, but regardless of the direction of influence, a lack of loose ties is often evident when poverty is present. As in all things in life, a healthy balance is needed between close and loose ties.

  The bottom line: Life’s choices are not only individual decisions. We’re in a web of social connections that spread far beyond the people we see every day, and some of those influences are positive, and some are negative. These networks may be an overlooked avenue for lessening poverty and dead ends for a large group of young adults. Helping young people cultivate broader networks—with the right connections—could become a critical weapon in fighting poverty, crime, and other social problems. Today’s “always on” networked world is providing just that bridge.

  Can Facebook Help Treaders Swim?

  “I already have 900 friends at NYU,” incoming freshman Mike Scolnic told The New Yorker in 2007. Scolnic was talking about his Facebook friends, all of whom had signed on to NYU’s Facebook page for incoming freshmen. They had checked one another out and had speculated about whether their roommate was a good fit based on his or her music, photos, and ramblings online. Students started keeping tabs on one another well in advance of their first Biology 101 class.

  That Scolnic maintains nine hundred friends on Facebook is not unusual in today’s always-on, networked world. Online communities such as Facebook or MySpace are at once shallow yet oddly intimate—public yet private. With regular postings and updates, friends can follow the quotidian ups and downs of life, post pictures, and join groups. Strung together, all of this information creates an intimacy that, although not the same as the intimacy gained from living together in a dorm or as roommates, is hardly glib or anonymous, either. Twitter, a microblog where people post “tweets” of information in 140 characters or less to anyone who subscribes, answers the age-old question among friends: “What’s up?” … and then some. In some respects, the constant stream of tweets from the serial Twitter user is the virtual equivalent of living together.

  The Internet and the social networking sites of young people today can be a stand-in for what elite families often provide for their children: exposure and contacts. The Internet is relatively classless today. In the past, wealthier families were much more likely to have an Internet connection in their homes than low-income families. However, this divide has became much less stark. A Pew survey in 2009 found that about 90 percent of those ages twelve through twenty-four were regularly online, and an earlier Pew survey in 2006 found that six in ten African Americans, and about eight in ten whites and English-speaking Hispanics, use the Internet. In fact, S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital: What Migration to Social Network Sites, Games and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future, finds that young African Americans access the Web for gaming, watching videos, and other social activities for 1.5 hours per day—often via mobile phones—compared with 30 minutes per day for white youths. Clearly, the majority of young adults now have online access.

  Think of the Internet as one big schmoozer. When young adults are looking for a job or thinkin
g of moving to another city, their first point of action is to log on to their social networking sites and advertise their plans. “I’m moving to Charlotte. Does anyone know someone who lives there?” Or they can post their résumé and let it be known they are looking for work. Before long, advice will come pouring in from all corners, and a few strong leads on jobs, housing, and new friends may pan out. This kind of mass networking can help young adults make a successful launch. The use of this type of networking is not confined to young adults, either. According to a 2007 survey by CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers use search engines and social networking sites to research job candidates. Of course, there is a potential downside to this, too. Employers can use Facebook and other such sites to find out damaging private information about job applicants.

  Social networking and digital media are instrumental in exposing young people to new ideas, broadening their horizons. Young adults who are regularly online confront opinions and ideas that are new to them. They actively participate by commenting on articles, blogging, or writing in forums, interacting with others who might have very different points of view. The Internet can open vistas, connecting people to one another with an ease that has never existed before. “Kids who have access to social networks,” says CauseWired author Tom Watson in an interview, “are more socially conscious—they find out about more.” Young people today are learning about the war in Darfur not from textbooks but from social networking causes. They are digging deeply into environmentalism. They are hearing opinions from Palestinians and Iraqis, which might challenge their take on world events. These young people are no longer limited to the confines of their neighborhoods; they have the world literally at their fingertips. This ability to find connections to causes that inspire or challenge worldviews, as well as the more mundane networks that might lead to jobs, can be invaluable to those with the fewest family resources.

  Joseph Kahne, of the Civic Engagement Research Group at Mills College, finds that digital media are more readily reaching those who are typically overlooked—those who do not attend college. These youths are using social networking sites to find out about issues as often as college students, and they are having the same discussions online that college students have in their dorms. “We found that the more they participate in digital media,” says Kahne, “the more they get that combination of exposure to both those who disagree and those who share core commitments. They get more exposure to a variety of perspectives.” The Internet, of course, is not some Pollyana world where everyone gets along. We tend to balkanize online as we do offline, but so far, according to Kahne, there’s little evidence to suggest that we segregate more online than off, and—in fact—some studies suggests that the cyberworld is more diverse than the physical world young Americans occupy today.

  Not everyone who goes online ends up pitching in to end world hunger, of course. Many are just interested in keeping tabs on their friends and posting videos of cats doing tricks. However, even the most mundane socializing on Facebook or other social networks can widen young people’s real-life networks. It can create the connections to friends of friends of friends that are often critical to getting ahead. When these networks are specialized, like the professional networking site LinkedIn, they can create both tight and loose ties—which, as noted earlier, can also foster opportunities for jobs or career advancement.

  Online social networks can also help a person overcome common obstacles to making friends, such as shyness or the inability to find a community of like minds where one lives. Second Life, an online virtual world where players interact in social settings that mimic real life, allows people to be who they want to be, and to create new circles of compatible friends from around the globe. As one participant in Second Life puts it, “Me and a few friends [in Second Life] hold little parties for everyone usually shunned by society, like nerds, gay/bi, disabled, and just about anyone else that feels bad about themselves. Without Second Life, some people wouldn’t have many friends.” Another example of how virtual worlds can help overcome real-life problems is a project initiated by Global Kids, an organization in New York that helps urban youths become global community leaders. The program immersed young men in the juvenile justice system in a virtual world, Teen Second Life. For these teens, who felt marginalized and stigmatized because of their past actions, being a part of this virtual world empowered them to act as mentors. They became dedicated to keeping kids out of trouble in their offline lives. The virtual world helped them to make valuable connections with others, and it allowed them to see beyond the physical limits of their incarceration.

  All this interconnectivity has the potential to widen the social networks of those whose physical networks are more confined and proscribed. Young adults in small towns or chronically poor communities or families can gain access to others with relative ease via the Internet. Whether this ability will broaden the web of connections and serve as an antidote to life situations that contribute to poverty and isolation remains to be seen. But it certainly has the potential to do so.

  Creating a Wider Web

  Friends and the social networks they create have always been an important factor in who people meet, work with, and even marry. What has changed recently is the longer and more prominent role that friends are playing in young adult lives as the amount of time most youths take between leaving their parents and setting up house with a new spouse or partner grows longer. This is also a stage of life in which young adults begin to plant stakes with initial jobs, routines, and patterns (some healthy, some not), dating and coupling up, and other momentous decisions. If social network researchers are right—and they certainly make a convincing argument—friends of friends of friends are central to determining young people’s futures, not only because of who they are (their race, ethnicity, income, or education) but because of whom they are connected to many degrees outward.

  Yet we also know that education determines the scope of a person’s social network. Those with more education have more people to talk to about things that matter to them, and the chances of having wider networks of loose ties grows with every year of education.7 High school graduates and even those with just some college circulate in very family-dominated social worlds. Indeed, those with college degrees, for example, have social networks that are nearly twice as large as those with only a high school diploma.8 However, young adults can overcome this narrow vista much more easily than other, more intractable conditions, such as location, income, or even education. They can join community groups, seek out like minds online, get involved by volunteering, and make an effort to network. None of this takes money—just time.

  Friendships can clearly provide a social boost to young adults’ futures. The communities of like minds that many young adults are forming today—whether physically close or distant—are important forms of social capital they can exchange for more than just companionship. Friendships are also serving another purpose: They are becoming the “communities” of today. Whereas in the not-so-distant past, young adults had largely settled into physical communities by their mid- to late twenties, today those neighborhoods have yet to be. Instead, this generation is creating communities of like minds with their deep and wide networks of friends and acquaintances, online and off. It is in these more ephemeral communities where the barriers of class, race, and income might begin to break down.

  6

  The Parent-Child Lifeline

  “Success in life is that your kids want to spend time with you once they’ve grown up.” That truism, attributed to Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s, is number 99 of the “The Way I See It” series printed on the ubiquitous Starbucks cups.

  Somewhere between Orfalea’s childhood and his children’s, the world of parenting tilted. Not so long ago, parenting reinforced a distinct line between the realms of adulthood and childhood. Children were to be seen but not heard. They played together in other rooms while adults socialized. They ran free in the neighborhood, learning life’s lessons b
y the school of hard knocks. Many parents today, in contrast, are highly involved in their children’s lives. Children and parents actually seem to like each other. They shop together at the mall, gossip on the phone, hang out watching the game, and share details of their lives that past generations would never fathom sharing. Parents enjoy the emotional support they receive from their children, and the validation that they still matter. Children enjoy, and often expect, the emotional and financial support they receive from their parents. Some, like Diana West in Death of the Grown-Up, have condemned this blurring of boundaries, attributing a rise in the “failure to launch” to parents who can’t let go or are just too indulgent.

  What do the relationships between parents and children look and feel like as the children move through the early adult years? Much is known about relationships between teenagers and their parents, on the early end of life, and between middle-aged “kids” and elderly parents, on the other. But virtually nothing is known about how the relationships between children and their parents are renegotiated as children become adults. We are especially interested in understanding the ramifications of a longer, more complicated passage to adulthood on these relationships, and how different types of parent–child connections affect the success of young people in a competitive, high-stakes world.

  The Network’s in-depth interviews with young adults provide an intimate window into the relationships they have with their parents. We uncovered three basic types. The first type is the extremely involved parents of most well-positioned young people. This group has carefully nurtured their children’s ability to converse easily and with confidence and to interact comfortably with adults. They have enrolled their children in activities and programs designed to expose them to the types of skills and manners they will need in a world that values critical thinking, leadership, and cooperation. The extremists among them, the infamous helicopter parents, are often mocked for their incessant hovering.