Adulthood? Later, Dude

Adulthood has become a dirty word in America. No one, it seems, wants to live the Cleaver life. Some would just as soon be in prison as be beholden to family, job and community. They see it as the antithesis of freedom. Others dream of suburbia and strollers, but simply don’t have the means.

That much is clear on a gleaming day along the bustling row of bars, restaurants and boutiques that line Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard.

“I’m basically still in the process of growing up,” says waiter Domenico Fragomeno, 24, as he stands in the doorway of La Dolce Vita. “I’m working day to day to get my own home, my own business, my own family. I hope it will happen . . . in the next five to eight years.”

Down the block, Joseph Ferris pooh-poohs such idealized visions of adulthood.

“Adults are boring,” the 54-year-old bachelor says as he sits in a darkened saloon, pitcher of beer at his side, book at the fore. “They have to be too responsible and worry about things that should not be worried about--possessions.”

What’s happening here?

America, some say, has become a nation of adolescents. The nation has been transformed so that self-indulgence takes precedence over family values, some experts argue. As some people in their 30s, 40s and 50s see no need to take charge of the world in the way their parents once did, the very young--adolescents and teens--are sometimes forced to act old prematurely for lack of guiding hands.

As the clock ticks toward 2000, it becomes clear that adulthood is what you make of it. No longer is 18 a ticket to ride into a world of responsibility, family and ethics. These have been reduced to lifestyle choices in a lifetime of endless choices. Being grown up is but a dull subculture with its own fashion (wood-paneled sport-utes), clubs (Price Club) and music (can you say “anthology?”).

“Adulthood,” contends the cynical cyber zine Suck, “sucks.”

The grown-up state of mind is coming at later and later ages, if at all. Many culture watchers and sociologists argue that true adulthood in America is postponed until at least after 30. It comes, they say, when people master responsibilities--ethics, finances, psychological stability--worthy of parenthood, regardless of whether they have children. Dictionaries list the word, a mix of Latin and French, as meaning the end of childhood, or the state of full physical and mental development.

Statistically, fewer people fit these definitions. Those ages 35 and older account for 43% of reported cocaine-related hospital emergencies, according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse--more than double the percentage for that age group in 1980. At the same time, there was a 76% rise in violent crime arrests for the 30-49 age group from 1980 to 1995, according to Michael A. Males, author of “The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War On Adolescents,” (Common Courage Press, 1996).

“We’re seeing a paralysis of will among adults,” Males argues.

Meanwhile, people stay in school longer (nearly half of those ages 35-54 attend adult and college courses), marry later (age 25 for the average woman, versus 21 in 1970; 27 for the average man, versus 23 in 1970), buy homes later (one-fifth of 25-year-olds live with parents) and get divorced faster (nearly half of all marriages end in divorce).

Diane Crispell, executive editor of American Demographics magazine, says there’s one very good reason people are growing up at older ages: money.

Higher paying jobs go to those who have better educations, so people stay in school and reach for higher degrees. Housing prices are through the roof (the Census Bureau reports that two-thirds of those ages 25 to 34 can’t afford a median-priced home in their area), so twentysomethings rent. The cost of living is at an all-time high, so young people take on college-style living arrangements with roommates or stay at home with Mom or Dad.

“Becoming a fully fledged adult is taking longer,” Crispell says, “partly because you have lots more people going to college for at least four years. There’s a sense in college at any age that you are still a dependent and you are not required to fully grow up.

“Then there is the delay in marriage and home buying, which is an extension of the idea of spending more time to think about their lives and trying to do it right.”

Author Gail Sheehy blames expanding life spans for prolonged adolescence. Average life expectancy is 75 and rising, with some experts predicting that people will live well into the triple digits in the next few decades. That pushes all phases of life into older years. Adolescence reaches into the 20s, midlife into the 50s.

“The life cycle,” Sheehy writes in “New Passages” (Random House, 1995), “has been fundamentally altered. . . . True adulthood doesn’t begin until 30.”

Yet author Neil Howe, one of the country’s foremost experts on generational sociology, takes a bit different view. He says each generation has its own tempo for turning adult, and that it’s not necessarily young adults who are acting like kids. In fact, people in their 20s and 30s actually grew up fast, he maintains.

“They grew up at a time of massive child under-protection,” Howe says, “so they raised themselves.”

With nearly half of them products of broken homes, young people are fiercely mobile and nomadic--”quick to jump ship” in work life, living arrangements and love life. That might explain why they get a rep for putting off adulthood.

“Their lifestyle is one of great autonomy,” Howe says. “They’re redefining adulthood.”

Indeed.

“I have grown-up responsibilities, like paying for my rent and school,” says Heather Garner, 22, a marine biology major at USC, whose parents divorced. She has supported herself since she was 18, working at such places as Banana Republic, an upscale chain store where she sells clothes. “Adulthood means being true to yourself--no longer depending on others.”

Baby boomers are said to have pioneered prolonged adolescence by tripping in the ‘60s, dancing in the ‘70s, snorting in the ‘80s--all the while challenging traditional sex, race and class roles. More than anything, Howe says, the questioning of values defined their relationship with adulthood. If that meant long hair and bong tokes, civil disobedience, even conservative reactivity, it was all in the name of weighing values.

“Boomers are proud to have positions on right and wrong,” he says.

But before the boomers there was the Silent Generation, born 1925 to 1942. It pioneered the midlife crisis, mass divorce and the sexual revolution (see Dudley Moore in the movie “10”), challenging the notions of midlife piety, lifelong sex partners and the indivisibility of marriage. Howe says “silents” were sheltered as babies of the Great Depression, so when prosperity reigned in the ‘70s (while they were in their 30s, 40s and 50s) they began “reaching out and discovering other people and taking chances for the first times for themselves.”

Boomers’ parents, the generation born roughly 1901 to 1924 and often called the G.I. Generation, treaded the Depression, fought World War II and produced six American presidents. They grew up fast and hard.

“The Depression and World War II made men’s men of that generation’s males,” Howe says. “They had clear coming-of-age experiences.”

*

The term “coming of age” was coined more than a century ago by French sociologists to describe dying as a child and being reborn as an adult. Sometime during the 20th century, traditional agrarian rites welcoming the young into cultural, religious and matrimonial adulthood--American “sweet 16s,” Jewish bar mitzvahs, Mexican quincean~eras--lost any ties to coming of age and were transformed into teenage house parties.

“Today,” Howe says, “coming out doesn’t have that kind of clarity. It’s no longer clear who in society is supposed to contribute and who is supposed to be dependent.”

That is the main assertion of Robert Bly, author of “The Sibling Society” (Addison Wesley, 1996).

“People don’t bother to grow up,” he writes, “and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half adults.”

Elders are unwilling to lead, even when implored, Bly has argued, and thus new generations are left to wallow in a childlike state without grown-ups to help “pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood.”

At the same time, kids are forced to act like adults because many adults abandon parental responsibility. Teenagers, Bly writes, “seem to have a kind of emotional knowledge that is far older than they are.”

Argues author Males: “Kids today are being raised by the most violent, drug-abusing parents in history.”

This leads to what Bly refers to as “the leveling process”--kids grow up fast while adults act young, and we are left with a nation of siblings.

But R.U. Sirius, Bay Area cyber-culture expert and author, says people can be responsible without acting under traditional--and perhaps outdated--notions of adulthood.

“Adulthood is an authoritarian concept,” says Sirius, 45, and never married. “To have to adhere to some handed-down set of behaviors and values is intrusive.

“I think it’s clear that just like everything else in our culture, the definitions of adulthood are up for grabs.”

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* People are staying in school longer (nearly half of those ages 35-54 attend adult and college courses).

* People are getting married later (age 25 for the average woman, 27 for the average man).

* People are buying homes later (one-fifth of 25-year-olds live with their parents).

* People are getting divorced faster (nearly half of all marriages end in divorce).