When Do You Become An Adult?
For those that work and serve in “young adult ministry” in our denomination (or any for that matter) this article in The New York Times is interesting reading, What Is It About 20-Somethings? I’ve often hear “20 Somethings” troubled with being labeled “young adults” and understand the issues with this distinction. I was not fond of that label either. Society considers a person an adult when you turn 18, you can be drafted into military service and vote at age 18, but a person cannot purchase booze or rent a car. We are a society of mixed messages for this age group that are enabled or discouraged by parents, professors, institutions, business, economic status, and religious practice.
If, as this researcher concluded, your 20’s is an extended adolescence what does that mean for our culture, for leadership, and family structures? Does this extended adolescence only matter to those with financial resources or families willing to provide the funding for “20 somethings” to find themselves? What will this mean for seminaries that are educating persons for ministry?
What Is It About 20-Somethings?
by Robin Marantz Hening | The New York Times | August 18, 2010Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner, as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?
It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.