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 second type of parents takes a more hands-off approach, mirroring how they themselves were raised. This group believes that children, once they are adults, must live in order to learn. Making mistakes is just part of the deal. While certain advantages come with this approach—for one, young people develop a realistic sense of what it means to be on their own—there are also costs.

  The third type of parents is neglectful, at best, and may even be abusive. For young people in these families, parents are not a source of support, but are instead a source of great risk and hardship.

  Of course, these basic types of relationships have always existed and, in reality, they fluctuate with the changing circumstances and needs of both parents and children. But as we will see, close and connected parent–child relationships are more typical today, representing a fundamental shift in family life. The absence of close ties is a riskier business now than it was in the past, and having neglectful or destructive relationships with parents is even riskier—especially considering how much support kids are getting from their parents when their relationships are good.

  The Spotlight Moves to Kids

  Parents today play much larger roles in the lives of their young adult children than ever before. One-half of young adults between eighteen and twenty-five say they see their parents daily, and nearly three-quarters say they see their parents at least once a week. Nearly two-thirds live within an hour of their parents. If they do not see one another, they talk on the phone regularly; nearly eight in ten young adults under age twenty-five talk with their parents by phone daily.1 Thanks to cell phones, talk is cheap, and thanks to other forms of communication—Facebook, instant messaging, text messaging, Skype—staying in touch is also easy. It wasn’t always that way. Many readers will recall waiting in line in dormitories to place expensive long-distance phone calls to parents each month, or every other week at best.

  Leave, not stay: This is what most American parents in the recent past groomed their children to do. As Meredith Small points out in her cross-cultural look at child rearing, Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent, American mothers in particular were socialized to foster autonomy and independence in their children from an early age. They put their children to sleep in cribs in separate rooms rather than bringing them into their own rooms, let alone their own beds. They preferred playpens and strollers to the prospect of nestling their babies to their bosom all day. Everything American parents did had the ultimate goal of preparing their offspring to stand on their own two feet as adults by age eighteen, if not sooner. American photographer Robert Frank inadvertently captured this impatience with childhood in his 1940s photograph of a New Orleans trolley car. In that picture, the children, clad in stiff suits and dresses, are seemingly in dress rehearsal for adulthood while the adults all stare and frown. Back then, adulthood was serious business, and the journey began early.

  In the course of the last century, all of that changed. If the twentieth-century family were displayed in an animation flip-book, the image revealed as the pages whiz by would be of a child moving from the margins to the center of the page, worthy of the care, love, and investment of parents. Children are now, as the scholar Ivar Frones says, rendered useless economically but priceless emotionally.2

  Not only are children in the center of the page, but they are present for many more pages. Several major shifts at the turn of the last century were critical in moving children to a more sheltered status. The first was compulsory education and child labor laws. These laws reflected the shift in society’s perception of children. They were no longer considered miniature adults; instead, they were seen as needing nurturing and protection. Children became people in their own right—and “childhood” and “adolescence” emerged as distinct periods of life characterized by unique developmental tasks and needs.

  Even more important, the basic terms of life changed dramatically. We can now count on a long and reasonably healthy life span. In the last century, the average American’s life span increased by twenty-five and thirty years, respectively, for men and women. Child mortality also all but vanished, and chronic illness and disability are now confined to old age and concentrated in a short period at the very end of life. Because life can be counted on, we come to know all members of our families—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and siblings—for much longer than ever before. This means that our positive relationships can be treasured longer. Of course, it also means that fractious ones will plague us for longer. (Or, if we’re inclined to be optimistic, that troubled relationships will have enough time to heal.)

  The final significant change affecting children and parents was the shrinking size of families. Big, sprawling families are a thing of the past. Women and couples have more control over the number and timing of births, and those births are far fewer, later, and farther apart than ever before. Coupled with longer life, today’s families are now taller and narrower in shape because there are more generations alive at once and fewer people in each generation.

  These conditions are precisely the reasons why many families can have greater closeness and connectedness today. Parents can invest greater time, resources, and emotions on the few children they have and know will survive to adulthood. Indeed, parents can now safely assume that their children will outlive them, which was not the case even a century ago. Yet because parents have fewer children, they also have more at stake: The hopes and dreams they have for their children are pinned on just a few of them. All of these changes set the stage for new ideas about raising children, leading directly to the intensive parenting and closer relationships we have come to know today.

  There Are No Free-Range Children Here

  Tensions between holding on and letting go are typical of parent–child relationships in early-adult life—and these tensions are felt on both sides. Parents must walk a fine line between allowing their young adult more freedom and keeping a careful watch over them (though that monitoring must become less intrusive with age). This dicey line gets even harder to walk after age eighteen, which continues to mark the age of autonomy and adulthood in the eyes of the law.

  In her second year of law school at an Ivy League school, Aviva is twenty-three and talks with her mother three times a day. “My mom has a handle on everybody,” she says. When Aviva’s sister was in college, the family visited every weekend. Luckily for Aviva, the number of visits has eased for her. The checkups have not. Her mother wants to know that she is meeting people and getting out, but also that she is studying and not wasting time or getting into trouble. She wants to know if Aviva is sleeping enough, if her grades are good, and if she is dressing appropriately for law school. “She’ll buy me something or she’ll make sure I have warm stuff, you know, do you have a suit, do you have good shoes? Is your apartment okay?”

  While her mother may believe she is helping, Aviva feels that her parents “will always think of [her] as a little child.” Ironically, Aviva’s mother phones so often that Aviva has taken to turning off her phone because the calls were disrupting her studying—the very thing her mother was trying to ensure she was doing. Aviva works hard to keep clear boundaries with her parents. “I don’t tell them too much,” she says, especially where boyfriends and friends are concerned. “I’m very close to them, I love them very much, and I would do anything for them. But there’s a barrier that’s between me and them. Not from them, but from me.”

  Although Aviva’s mother risks pushing her daughter away with this constant surveillance, Aviva knows just how competitive this world is and she appreciates her family’s support. Her mother has been a central presence in her daughters’ lives from early on, perhaps out of displaced frustration about her own blocked career in their former home of Ukraine and the family’s struggles to gain a foothold in the United States. It is easy to see how she might shift all of her energy to her daughters. Yet in many ways, Aviva’s mother is little different from the many middle- and upper-class parents who are highl
y involved in their children’s lives from day one. From the Baby Einstein phase to preschool competitions to traveling soccer teams to violin and orchestra lessons, today’s parents are diligently, some might say obsessively, trying to ensure that their children will have bright futures. At the behest of child development experts, families have invested heavily in their children, carefully cultivating them for successful adulthoods. We’ve all heard the stories—or perhaps have lived them—of the harried mother whose daily schedule of shuttling and organizing playdates, team practices, music lessons, and tutoring classes resembles a CEO’s. The pace is frantic, but parents don’t want to ease up because the risks are too great. One father living in the suburbs of Chicago admits guiltily: “I wish I could get off the treadmill, but I don’t want my kid to lose out.”

  These parents, largely middle and upper class, are building the “capital” of their children through sports, music, art, and other activities, and are preparing them to make their way in a world that requires assertive, outspoken thinkers. Anxious to ensure that their children stay on a positive academic and social course, they will quickly intervene at any sign of risk. Pierre, a twenty-five-year-old from San Diego, with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, remembers how his mother would go into “Supermom” mode to redirect him when needed and work with his teachers to ensure that he got good grades. “She just started being very involved with my schoolwork, and teaching me how to learn. She’s always been there. She just came in there and taught me, and I just surged ahead. It was almost funny.” Pierre attributes these activities of his mother, along with the support of the rest of his family, as being the factors that ultimately determined his success in life.

  The investments of these parents are probably most pronounced when their children are dealing with college applications and admissions and the critical first year in college. Their efforts often set their children apart from the treaders, who struggle to find their way through the college maze, tripping up frequently and making costly mistakes. These involved parents are also quick to tap into their personal social networks in an effort to maximize their children’s opportunities once they graduate from college—helping them to get that coveted internship or job or to be accepted at the graduate or professional school of their choice.

  These much-maligned helicopter parents may not be as harmful as we’re inclined to think, even if they clearly go too far. A recent survey of parents and students in twenty-four colleges found that students whose parents were in frequent contact with them and intervened on their behalf were more engaged in school, more likely to talk with their professors after class, and more satisfied with and doing better in college than students with less involved parents.3 This research finding is a logical extension of earlier research on teens, which found no deleterious effects of overinvolved parenting, especially where academic performance is concerned. In fact, parental involvement and monitoring are consistently strong predictors of the achievements of adolescents.

  That doesn’t mean parents should go overboard. What we might call “Extreme Parenting” can come with real costs. Some problems need to be experienced by young people in order for them to grow—even if it’s difficult for parents to resist the impulse to step in and make the save. Recognizing when to hold and when to fold is surely one of the most difficult tasks that parents face with children of any age, but it is particularly tricky once children become young adults and are expected to achieve—or to be working toward—autonomy and independence.

  Among the hundreds of young people we interviewed, we did not find many cases of the extreme monitoring and intervention symbolized by helicopter parents, at least not as reported by the kids. Being actively involved in children’s lives is different from being a Black Hawk. This middle ground between intense hovering and entirely absent characterizes most parent–child relationships today.

  MOM as BFF

  As children moved to center stage, the boundary between adults’ and children’s worlds softened. Parents dispensed with the notion that children should be seen and not heard. They wanted their children to be comfortable among adults. This is not to suggest that parents no longer ruled the roost. They did and still do. Rather, it means that young adults today are not cowed by the adult world and that they have very little reason to think of their parents as distant out-of-touch authority figures. This is a direct result of the fact that new kinds of parents parent in new kinds of ways.

  The growing ease of relationships between parents and their young adult children is reflected in the shrinking generation gap. A Network-commissioned study shows that, since the 1970s, differences across generations on a wide range of attitudes, values, and behaviors have narrowed.4 Gaps are even closing for the most controversial topics, including abortion, gender roles, sex, and civil liberties. Today’s youths are more likely to find greater agreement with their parents than did their counterparts in the 1970s and 1980s. The shrinking generation gap means that parents and children today have more in common than they did in the past. There is less psychological and social distance between them, which provides a stronger foundation from which to build close relationships. The more liberated views of recent generations of parents has also been a primary factor in bringing about the more involved and expressive parenting we know today.

  Young adults today see their parents, and especially their mothers, as a source of not only advice and counsel, but also companionship and comfort. Valentina’s case is typical. “My mom and I are best friends. She calls me every day to tell me how her day went, and I do the same.” Her mother says of her visits, “It’s like sun comes into the window.” Valentina laughs, “How much better can it get?” At twenty-two, she lives in Philadelphia, where she coordinates research while applying to Ph.D. programs in clinical psychology. She sees her parents in New York at least once a month. Unlike Aviva, who actively constructs barriers with her parents to offset the intrusions she feels from them, Valentina exudes openness and warmth in describing her relationship with her parents, whom she says were able to shelter her “with love and warmth so I was able to develop, to thrive.”

  Jerome’s mother plays a huge role in his life. In fact, he readily admits he’s a mama’s boy. “Me knowing that she’s there for me gives me extra confidence,” he says. “And I live for her. Everything I do in my life is to show how much I appreciate the fact that she’s raised me the way I have been raised. So, all my accomplishments, even my degree—as soon as I got my degree, I gave it to her. ’Cause she earned it just as much as I did.”

  At twenty-five, Jerome lives with his mother and brother in a Queens co-op the family has shared for twenty-two years. His degree was in education, and today he teaches sixth grade in the city. His teacher’s salary ensures that “everything stays afloat,” while his mother regains her health after a diagnosis of lupus. Jerome clearly adores his mother, and he is also very protective of her. “She’s my best friend,” he says. Part of Jerome’s closeness to his mother stems from her frail health and from the fact that his father left the family early in Jerome’s life.

  Jerome’s mother struck a middle ground between a hands-off, learn-the-hard-way approach and overinvolvement. She wanted Jerome to feel life’s lessons firsthand, and she taught him that he was responsible for his actions. “Even when I was a knucklehead in high school getting drunk, she’d let me get drunk”—but she would also let him feel the consequences the next day. While she allowed Jerome to trip up, she also gave him clear advice.

  Jerome would like to move out, but he doesn’t want to leave until his future plans fall into place. He’s thinking about graduate school and wants to find the right program. Then he and his girlfriend of six months will have to find a place to live. “Personally, I think it’s about time for me to spread those wings and leave the nest. And Mom’s fully aware of it, she has no problems with it, and she supports me in everything I do.” His mother, however, will not be left alone. “She’ll come stay with us. No nursing homes
, nothing like that.”

  You Can Go Home Again

  Since the middle of the last century, growing numbers of young adults like Jerome have co-resided with their parents—staying on at home longer or boomeranging back as needed. In 2007, about 38 percent of women and 43 percent of men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were living with their parents.5 After the age of twenty-five, however, proportions march downward with age—at the ages of twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five, the percentages of women who live at home are 21, 10, and 6 percent; for men, they are 26, 12, and 8 percent. Women have always tended to leave earlier than men to cohabit or marry. It is also worth noting that at the turn of the twentieth century, young people stayed at home longer than those who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, mid-century was a low point for living with parents. The numbers would begin to climb steadily after that, picking up steam beginning in the 1980s. In 1960, for example, approximately 8 million young adults lived with their parents between the ages of 18 and 34. That number would more than double by 2007, to approximately 19 million. Of course, the overall population of young adults nearly doubled at the same time so the proportion of young people living at home increased more slowly, from 22 percent in 1960 to 28 percent in 2007. To leave home quickly in the 1950s and 1960s was normal because opportunities were plentiful and the social expectations of the time reinforced the need to do so—to stay would have been humiliating.