Betwixt and Bewildered

When she was 18, the mother of a 21-year-old recalled, she could hardly wait to go away to school and move out of her parents’ house. Most of her friends felt the same way. Nobody knew who they went out with, where they went, what they did or when they got in.

Her son, on the other hand, lives at home and likes it. A junior in the Cal State system, he doesn’t have to pay rent or buy groceries. “He has a TV, a computer and a double bed. What more could a guy want?

“The one thing that’s been weird has been having his girlfriend spend the night,” said the single mother, who also has a boyfriend. “How can I say ‘I can, but you can’t’?” she asked. “When do you say he’s an adult?”

It’s a common question, and one that a growing number of parents and researchers are trying to answer. Social and economic realities have suspended the traditional markers of adulthood--moving out, finishing school, starting a job, getting married and having children. Old expectations for independence have been joined by new ones for career success and happiness.

Indeed, scholars say the path to adulthood, never particularly smooth, is not only longer, but also more circuitous, complex, expensive and vaguely defined than ever before. Rather than settling down with a spouse and children as their grandparents did, most high school seniors go on to college or pursue advanced degrees. They move about and hop from job to job. They live with various friends or significant others. An ever-increasing number move back home with their parents at some point after they move out.

Some specialists in human development now believe the years between 18 and 25 are more than an extended adolescence, that they comprise a distinct life stage that is neither adolescent nor adult, a heretofore nameless nether world of angst and hope. Jeffrey Arnett, an independent scholar based at the University of Maryland, calls it “emerging adulthood.” Terri Apter, a research psychologist in Cambridge, England, and author of “The Myth of Maturity” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), calls those young adults “thresholders.”

The members of this group, said Arnett, are living in a state marked by more risk and exploration than adolescence itself. Emerging adults, he said, are “freer now than they have ever been in American history. It used to be just for the elite. Now it’s for the majority.”

Even as they document this new stage of life, scholars disagree about whether these changes should be a cause for celebration or concern. A boom-and-bust marketplace, overly involved parents and mixed expectations are creating new pressures for young adults who fear they might never make it on their own. But, say others, the longer transition offers an unparalleled opportunity. Especially for those from disadvantaged or dysfunctional families, they say, this make-or-break phase can be a chance to invent or reinvent a life.

“We’re going through a real sea change in how we define what adulthood is, what maturity is, what dependence is, what a steady job is,” said Stephanie Coontz, a family historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Although the young aren’t the only ones trying to sort out their life paths, they are the most obvious, she said. “They have to make decisions right now--when to get married, when to move out.” And sometimes, more simply, when and how to have fun.

The Trappings of Both Youth and Adulthood

Scott O’Malley, 23, knows people expect him to be struggling at this point in his life. Since he moved to Los Angeles last year after graduation from Syracuse University to start a film writing career, he has been laid off twice from the same beleaguered dot-com, worked as a filing clerk and had to ask his parents for money.

But he’s not interested in pretending to be a nose-to-the-grindstone, dinner-party adult and still wants to play the way he did at school. O’Malley likes to drink with his friends once a week at the Pitcher House in Hermosa Beach, and rather than stop after a few, he prefers to keep on until they all crash at somebody’s house. “I expect to have a different kind of fun later on,” he said. “But ultimately, I want to do what’s fun now.”

Even as O’Malley defended his right to party, he said he felt embarrassed to admit it. “It’s sort of a taboo subject. We all still want to party and have fun, but we’re expected not to show it,” he said.

Contradictory expectations take a toll on young adults, Apter said. While it’s true that children appear more savvy at earlier ages, most 18-year-olds are not as mature as many colleges and parents expect them to be, she said. “A lot of their knowledge of the adult world and what it will take [to become an adult] is very superficial.” Even though young adults complain that people, especially employers, treat them as children, the reverse is actually true, Apter said. “People think they are grown up and so they treat them as grown up before they actually are.”

Because some colleges believe it’s inappropriate to enforce rules or check up on students, she said, “when young people leave home today, they’re more alone than they were 20 or 30 years ago.” Many colleges have abandoned the in loco parentis role and let students construct their own majors. “That’s a combination of a lot of pressure and too much freedom,” she said. “It can make them very anxious when they make choices.”

Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard University dean of admissions and financial aid, said he has seen a consistent growth in anxiety levels among college students over the last two decades. The cause, he believes, is too little, rather than too much freedom. Overscheduled and controlled throughout childhood by their parents, many students are burned out and unable to be introspective about their own futures, he said. Some college students are so frenzied, they have to schedule a 20-minute meeting at 7 a.m. just to catch up with a friend, he said. Others might fail classes, consciously or unconsciously, as a way to deal with parents who have imposed inappropriate majors on them.

University officials have found students mature remarkably in just a year if they can take time off from school, Fitzsimmons said. However, Jeylan Mortimer, a life-course specialist at the University of Michigan, said most students don’t have the resources to take time off, travel or spend time mulling over their possibilities. “They’re struggling to find their way, moving in and out of school and work, running into financial problems. They struggle with the whole process.”

Parents Keep an Eye on Their Investment

Even as some officials hope parents will back off, some say they can’t in the face of soaring tuition and housing costs and less support from government aid programs. In fact, many are actually more involved than ever, said Richard Flaherty, president of College Parents of America, a 5-year-old national organization of 200,000 families dedicated to preparing and helping parents put children through college “economically, safely and easily.”

Some parents want to be involved because they believe it will make their children more successful, others “seek a greater investment on their education dollar,” hoping their children will graduate in four years, he said.

As a result, many young adults are now forced to depend on parents just at the time when they need to separate from them, said Coontz. “We’ve put young people in an impossible situation,” she said.

For example, they are increasingly unable to leave home permanently the first time they move out. “It’s like stopping smoking. You have to keep trying a couple of times,” said Frances Goldscheider, professor of sociology at Brown University. “In the 1930s, only 25% of those who left home returned. By the mid-’80s, it was up to 40%.” Now, though she doesn’t have current numbers, she estimates that the figures are higher.

Not only do parents find their nest still full, it is sometimes cluttered with boyfriends and girlfriends. The single mother whose 21-year-old son lives at home said she often tells her son that he can’t be like their neighbor, a 40-year-old man who lived at home until his parents retired, sold their house and moved away. “I do expect him to move out eventually,” she said, “once he’s financially solvent.”

Apter believes that too many parents feel they shouldn’t be helping their thresholder children. “We’re used to thinking about the dangers of keeping our children connected to us. These are real concerns in some cases, but what’s happened is our awareness of the dangers of being too close has made us devalue normal healthy closeness and connection,” she said.

In an era in which outside supports have diminished and young people feel they have to look after themselves, she said, “to value the connections that remain is a way of survival.”

An ‘Overwhelming Helplessness’

One problem with studying the transition to adulthood is that researchers tend to have limited funds and so turn most often to students for their subjects. Another is that there has been little information about how people experience that phase of life.

Among the first to describe how it feels to navigate this extended transition are Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, authors of “Quarterlife Crisis” (Tarcher/Putnam). They say young adults like themselves face nearly unlimited options and are jolted by “overwhelming helplessness and cluelessness, indecision and apprehension.”

The authors, both in their 20s, have said many people mistakenly think the 20s are easy and carefree. In fact, they said, many young adults are emotionally paralyzed and turn to antidepressants to deal with the angst of growing up. One chapter is titled, “What if I’m Scared to Stop Being a Kid?”

Arnett noted that many students do not finish college, or at least not in four consecutive years. Only a third of the college population obtains a bachelor’s degree in their 20s, he said. “They’re talking about the most fortunate segment of the most affluent generation of the most affluent society in human history. And all they can talk about is how tough they have it? It’s like a rich guy complaining about the problems he’s having with his Mercedes.”

Many emerging adults have legitimate problems stemming from educational loans and credit card debt, he said. At the same time, a “lottery-based society” has created pressures unrelated to one’s finances, background or parents, Coontz said. “It doesn’t matter how stable you grew up; the person next to you, just by luck, got out of the stock market at just the right time and is now wandering around a millionaire while someone else, just by luck, lost out. It creates a ‘why me?’ mind-set interspersed with grandiose, narcissistic dreams of really making it.”

An underemployed 25-year-old said he is “shooting for the stars” with a plan to start his own business. “It’s weird how much pressure there is,” he said. “You see other friends succeeding, making the money. I’m going to be there but I’m not there now and it hurts to see that. You want to be there so bad.”

O’Malley questions the wisdom of an arbitrary system that still asks young people to pay their dues. “I’ve come across 19-year-old cold fusion experts who are making $50,000 and have a parking spot,” he said, impressed by the rogue nature of such success. “It throws the system off. It makes you think.”

Despite their problems, Arnett said most of the 200 young people he interviewed over the last seven years were much happier than they had been as adolescents. They get along with parents and regret that they were rude, he said. Most are full of hope and ambition, even if their backgrounds were difficult.

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Some scholars said emerging adulthood is a luxury of the educated middle and upper classes, experienced only by those who stay in school and remain childless.

Nevertheless, Arnett said, it is an especially important opportunity for those whose parents were poor or dysfunctional in some way. “Emerging adulthood represents a chance to remake your life,” he said.

For the poor, it may be now or never. “Children and adolescents are really at the mercy of families, for better or worse. The chances to turn your life around are not in childhood and adolescence. And in a way, there won’t be any once you take on new long-term commitments, especially children,” he said.

Barbara Schneider, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said it is imperative to understand that young adults, though they may be grouped in a single generation, are not all alike, one way or another. In her studies of 1,221 adolescents whom she followed into adulthood, Schneider found they fell into three groups: those who had a clear idea about what they wanted to do in the future, a transitional group trying to find themselves and a “diffuse” group who had no idea what they wanted to do.

The diffuse group tended most to founder, changing colleges and taking longer to get a degree. Transitional students also have a difficult time if they don’t establish a path for themselves by their junior year, she said. “This is the group that at the end of college is more likely to feel they have not lived up to their expectations. Mom says, ‘We spent all this money and you want to be a what ?”’

Maurissa Horwitz, 23, said she switched from chemistry to film studies as her major after three years at Dartmouth, guided by her parents’ mantra: Choose a job that makes you happy. Now a freelance assistant editor for films and TV in Los Angeles, Horwitz said she still constantly asks herself, “Am I happy enough with my work? Is this really making me happy?”

In 10 years, she thinks she might finish the transition she can’t describe exactly. “It’s just a feeling of settlement, being married, starting a family or being a homeowner.”

Rather than being paralyzed by her options, she finds comfort in them. “If five years down the road, I find I’m not happy, I know a million other paths I can take,” she said. “I feel I’ve gotten a great, well-rounded education. If I decided something else interested me, I think I could work hard enough at it to make it happen.”

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The Changing Face of Young Adulthood * Percentage of 18-to 34-year-olds living at home with their parents in 1960: 23.

* Percentage in 2000: 28.

* Median age of marriage in the U.S. in 1960: 20 for women, 23 for men.

* Median age in 2000: 25 for women, 27 for men.

* Median age of first childbirth in 1960: 22.

* Median age in 1999: 24.

* Percentage of high school seniors pursuing higher education in 1960: 45.

* Percentage today: 65.

* Average annual cost of undergraduate tuition, room and board at a private college in 1960: $2,000.

* Cost in 2000: $16,322.

* Percentage of college students who say they plan to live with their parents for some time after graduation: 56.

* Percentage who say they’ll do it for more than a year: 19.

* Percentage of college students who believe they will be more successful than their parents: 66.

* Average number of months young adults stay in their first jobs: 12 to 20.

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Sources: U.S. Census; U.S. Department of Education; Monster.com; American Demographics; Twentysomething Inc.; American Psychologist.