C-Span Interview on Youth Vote

Network member Connie Flanagan and PhD student Amy Syvertsen recently discussed young adults and politics on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Listen here.

Connie and Amy discussed recent findings on the youth vote, community service, and other forms of civic participation. The bad news is that conventional acts, like giving money to politicians, writing to your Congressman, are down among young adults. The good news is that community services is climbing. Another bit of good news is the strong uptick in voter registration among youth. Since 2004, we've seen steady gains in youth participation-- even in the 2006 midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, youth make up 9% of total registered voters, or 8.3 million potential voters.

The rise in community service could also be a good harbinger because the strongest predictor of voting and being involved is simply being there. Being in a 4H group or being on a college campus or in a church group sparks interest and "hooks" young adults. If other people are doing it, you pay attention and want to join in. Participation then becomes a habit.

One worrisome finding is the sharp divides in participation by education. Young people who do not go to college are far less likely to vote, volunteer, or be involved actively in their community.

You can read more of Connie's work here and here.
---B. Ray

Young Adults and Volunteering

“Volunteering absolutely makes a difference. Whether you're volunteering as a tutor at
school, or like me, as a Boy Scout leader, or whether you're volunteering to read to somebody in a nursing home, it affects people's lives. And it makes your life more
fulfilling. It makes you have a good feeling, which probably makes you a happier person, which probably makes you better to be around.”

Tom was a 29-year-old computer analyst living in St Paul when the Network interviewed him a few years ago. Although he holds a full-time job, three times a week he teaches swimming to youth at the community center in the neighborhood where he grew up. He also sits on the planning board of the local Boy Scouts organization, which meets once a week. Tom started volunteering for both these programs when he was 18.

Americans are a nation of volunteers, but some have raised concerns that young adults today aren’t doing their part. The “me” generation is too cynical, too isolated behind their computers, or too selfish to pitch in, some say. Others see their volunteering as just a way to pad resumes for college applications.

Solid numbers are hard to come by, but it appears that the skeptics are being challenged. Young adults who started volunteering in high school, often to fulfill their “service learning” requirement, are continuing to pitch in during college. Volunteering by college students is growing at twice the rate of all other volunteering, according to a recent report by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The Obama campaign, and the Howard Dean campaign before it, have shown that youth do get involved in politics.

Yet, we still know relatively little about why young adults get involved, and more important, how—through which channels, which approaches speak to youth, and what keeps them interested. One thing is clear. Youth like Tom who start early in life are much more likely to become life-time volunteers. What is less clear is how institutions and organizations can hook that interest early and sustain it.

The Network recently opened the topic up for discussion at the biennial meetings of the Society for Research on Adolescence. Psychologists from Germany, Chile, Switzerland, and the United States spent the morning discussing how and why young adults volunteer, its effects on their well-being, and how the field can work to better understand their efforts and the benefits of civic participation both to society and to individuals.

“I think volunteering can be frustrating at times. People don't appreciate what you're doing,” said Tom. “But I think it's meaningful, especially if you're working with young people like I do. You make their lives, hopefully, one little bit better each week. And it makes your community better.”

In an existential sense, being a part of something bigger gives us meaning, it helps to shape our ideas of who we are and how we fit into the world. The need to matter remains central to the human condition. Perhaps modern society—paradoxically more connected technologically than ever before—is piquing our need as humans to matter and stand up and be counted. Down with anomie, up with people. After a few decades of rising materialism, disenchantment, distrust, and misanthropy among young adults, perhaps the reaction has begun.

Youth Vote-- Will They?

I sat talking politics with a friend last night and he was certain that all the excitement among young adults about politics (mainly following Obama) would all fizzle in the end. “They talk a good game but they don’t get off their duffs and vote,” he said.

A couple of recent studies by CIRCLE, a research group studying civic participation, might signal a shift.

In the mid-term elections in 2006, turnout among 18-29-year-olds increased for the second major election in a row, growing to approximately 24 percent, up at least 2 points over 2002 levels,

“Young people led the way in this election. While voter turnout overall grew only slightly, youth turnout rose substantially,” said Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE. “Young voters have witnessed the largest increase in support of Democratic congressional candidates since 2000—nine percentage points. Their shift in voting behavior and their increased turnout clearly had an effect on the 2006 election results.” [go here for the full report]

In another study by CIRCLE, college students are apparently “hungry for political conversation that is authentic, involves diverse views and is free of manipulation and ‘spin,’” The report follows up on a 1993 study published that found students considered politics “irrelevant” to their lives and they saw little purpose in actively participating in politics.

So, what do you think. Will young adults vote?

Is College Still Worth It?

Based on a study by Cecilia Elena Rouse and Lisa Barrow, Does College Still Pay, published in the Economists' Voice, vol 2, issue 4, 2005 <http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol2/iss4/art3/>

As the costs of college rise, and as more people face the monthly college loan payment, some might begin to wonder, is it worth it? Does college still pay?

For years, the answer to that question was a resounding yes. As the job market increasingly demanded higher-skilled workers and as the bottom dropped out on the wages of the lowest skilled workers, the returns to college were huge. The key reason for the increasing value of a college education was the cost of not having one. By 1989, wages for college grads were more than 70% higher than for high school graduates. That started to change in the 1990s as the wages of non-college grads began to increase, closing the gap somewhat. Couple that with the rising tuition costs and the fact that more youth must fund their tuition with loans instead of federal grants, many are wondering, can I afford to go to college, or is it the case that I can't afford not to go?

Rouse and Barrow recently calculated those costs. They find that the average full-time student who entered college in 2003 and finished in four years would pay $30,325 in tuition and fees. But on top of that are the wages forgone while attending school. If you could make $20,000 each year between age 18 and 22, the future wages from a college degree had better pay that and more if college is worth the time and money. Factoring in this "opportunity" cost of attending college, the cost of attending college rises to $107,277. Therefore, to be valuable, college has to boost lifetime earnings by at least $107,277.

In fact, it does, and more. College will boost a graduate's earnings by $402,959, leaving the net value of a college degree at about $295,682. In short, a student entering college today can expect to recoup her investment within 10 years of graduation. In other words, college still pays.

The big question, though, is will college continue to pay in the near future? For the foreseeable future, the likely answer is yes. Wages for high school graduates would have to increase by 95% with no increase in college-grad wages in order to make the value of college disappear. Even during the booming economy of the mid-1990s, real wage growth for high school graduates averaged only 4.6%. At the same time, we must recognize that while the real wages of college graduates have historically increased over time, globalization and technological progress could change all of that. With technological innovation, even our most skilled workers are starting to compete for jobs with workers overseas, and as supply and demand demands, wages for college grads would likely fall.

Thus, like all other investments, paying for college involves some risk. But, it's also likely to remain one of the best deals around.


Cecilia Elena Rouse is Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and is a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. Lisa Barrow is a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Upward Mobility and Class in America

Originally published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 20, 2005, as an op-ed.

Teresa Toguchi Swartz, Douglas Hartmann

As Americans, we’d like to think that where or to whom you’re born is only a temporary status. With a little hard work, some gumption, and a bootstrap, we can be anyone we want to be. That certainly seems to be the case with a group of 20-somethings who grew up in St. Paul, whom our research group is interviewing in an effort to better understand how the transitions from adolescence to adulthood are unfolding today. These young adults believed for the most part that they were the authors of their lives and, if they were unhappy with the way things were going, that they could plan for and act to change things.

But is that really the case? Or does class matter in America? Consider this: Our findings show that in their early 20s, nearly two-thirds of young adults receive financial support from their parents, and 40% of those in their late 20s still receive assistance from parents in some form or another. However, and here is where class rears its head, young adults in the top one-fourth of family income categories receive three times more in material assistance than those in the bottom one-fourth. This occurs even though higher-income youth are only 10–15% more likely to attend college than low-income youth.

The importance of class was probably no more evident than in our interviews in St. Paul. While most, although not all, of the young Minnesotans we spoke with could count on their families for continued support as they established themselves, it was clear that those from more affluent families received significantly more financial help—for their education, rent, health and car insurance, and even down payments on homes—while their less well off peers spoke of struggling to pay for these or forgoing them altogether.

Consider Jake and Bo, two white 29 year olds who both attended St. Paul public schools. Following high school, Jake’s parents paid for his BA at William and Mary. After graduating, he attended a prestigious private law school on the East Coast, also financed by his parents. Bo, meanwhile, attended a local public university, which he felt was his only option because his mother could not afford to foot his education bills. Despite working substantial hours while attending college, he dropped out when he found himself having to go without food. Jake is now an attorney, while Bo has worked a series of manual and service jobs. Recently laid off, Bo has returned to community college, still hoping to someday earn his degree and land a well-paying job.

Yet despite these distinct trajectories, Bo remains optimistic that he can make a turnaround. Bo is not alone in this. Predictably, we found optimism over work and financial futures more prevalent for white, middle-class, and highly educated youth. But even those facing more challenges believed that hard work and determination would eventually pay off. As Bo said, “If I have to do something completely different tomorrow, as long as I’m willing and able to work at it, I think I’ll be fine.” The one concession for poor and working-class kids, it seemed, was to have reined in their aspirations; for example, hoping for a “clean” office job if they currently did manual labor or for increasing their commission from phone solicitations or bill collections.

On the whole, young people did not see their background and past experiences as determining their futures, and they viewed the world as offering them the chance to continually reshape their life through reflection, planning, goal-setting, and hard work. In short, the American Dream.

Indeed, the advantages of the private scaffolding that families provide their young adult children remain hidden, despite the very real inequities in material support that young adults from different classes receive from their parents. Relying on private families to deal with the many, larger structural changes (such as declining wages for males, higher housing costs, higher college tuition, more jobs that demand higher education) means that those with more resources will be better able to afford more—and a class divide will only widen. Without stronger safety nets, such as affordable health care, subsidized education (think GI Bill), school-to-work supports, and others, the optimism and can-do spirit of Bo and his peers may quickly disappear.


Teresa Toguchi Swartz, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota. Swartz is the author of Parenting for the State (Routledge Press, 2005). Doug Hartmann is Associate Professor of Sociology, at the University of Minnesota, and is the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: 1968 Olympic Protests and their Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

John Q. Public: Connecting the Dots

Connie Flanagan

Could it be that the fear of “big government” is receding? Could it be that voters are beginning to demand more from their elected officials? If a turning point is indeed upon us, we should make doubly sure that the youth of this country are swept up in the movement, because without them, the future is surely lost.

As we all know, young adults of today have slowly disengaged from the political process. Their confidence in the Supreme Court, the executive branch, the Congress, and the press has sunk precipitously. Their concept of a public has all but disappeared.

When I posed the question to students in my Civic and Community Engagement class, “Who is the public, what are public goods, and what can the public expect from its government?” without exception they thought “the public” meant poor people, those who could not afford the luxury of good (private) schools and thus had to attend (inferior) public schools; those who could not afford their own car and had to depend on unreliable and often unavailable “public” transportation.

After my initial shock, I realized that this generation had grown up during several decades when public goods and services were eroding. Before they were born, President Reagan deregulated the media, the airlines, and the health care industries. Financial support to public schools eroded as voucher programs encouraged families to instead buy private school services and as legislation such as No Child Left Behind forced school districts to pay for (typically private) tutoring when their test scores didn’t measure up.

Students are ripe for action. Although they rarely place their faith in government, they do respond to issues in their local (and global) communities and believe citizens can make a difference. National studies of college freshmen show that more than 80 percent have done community service, up significantly from the 1980s and 1990s. And not just bake sales. The level of their ambition and social contribution is impressive.

We can revitalize democracy by making the most of the more positive attitudes towards a role for government as well as youth’s idealism, energy, and commitment to a common good. To do so we must help younger generations see the links between their direct actions in community service (whether tutoring in low-income schools or testing water quality in local streams) to public policies and to hold public officials accountable. Citizen groups like Democracy Rising groups are calling for a truly representative democracy in which the voice of the public is restored. The younger generation must be reconnected to the political process through their community and public service. Some service learning and public scholarship courses in high schools and colleges are already connecting the dots between community service, public issues, and government accountability. More is needed.

Perhaps the voters in California, Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington State who rejected tax cuts do signal a shift in attitude toward “big government,” and perhaps Hurricane Katrina, like September 11 before it, further underscored the importance of a vital government and public sector. Perhaps the voters will show my students—and all those other committed youth—that the public is all of us, in it together.


Connie Flanagan a professor of youth civic development at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, which is studying what it means to be a young adult in today’s society. She is co-editor of On Your Own Without A Net: The Transition to Adulthood for Vulnerable Populations (University of Chicago Press).

Are Young Adults Afraid to Leave the Nest?

Frank Furstenberg

There is a lot of talk these days in the popular press about the apparent unwillingness of young adults to cut the apron strings and leave home. The story line favored by many commentators is that the current generation has been so indulged by their parents that they are becoming dependent on a family welfare system where they feel entitled to remain at home and draw allowances from their parents indefinitely. And their parents, in turn, are incapable of giving them the gentle shove they so badly need to go out on their own.

Curiously enough, there is simply no evidence to substantiate the claim that young people in their late teens or twenties are more likely to remain at home today than they did in the past once we account for their marital status. Over the past several decades, the marriage rates of 18–34 year olds have been falling, mainly because youth are delaying marriage longer than they did a generation or two ago, not eschewing it. Because single people have always been far more likely to live with their parents than their married counterparts, more young adults are living at home today. Yet, even given that, young adults are still far less likely to live with their parents today than in the past. Using historical information from the decennial census, authors of a recent report in the American Sociological Review report that the proportion of young people aged 20–29 are about half as likely to live with their parents today than they were in the post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s. So the proportion of single youth who remain at home has been dropping at the same time that more young adults are single, creating the appearance that young adults have a greater taste for living with their parents.

Evidence is mounting that young adults are not remaining single so that they can mooch off their parents. They are deferring marriage because these days it takes much longer to acquire the requisite schooling and job experience to obtain a well paid job. And most say that they are unwilling to enter marriage without having a career and stable employment. That’s not such a bad thing.

In the meantime, many do look to their family for help during the transition to adulthood. Of course, they would be less likely to do so if government support for education were still at the level it was in the 1950s and 1960s, if housing costs had not risen to unparalleled highs, and if well paying jobs were more readily available to young people. As a result of these rising costs and demands, parents are increasingly called on to help out, offering room and board, help with tuition, or other supplements to help launch their offspring. Contrary to popular images, young adults are also doing their fair share. The overwhelming majority are working, often at low-paying jobs, or they are in school full-time. Many are juggling jobs and education to help pay for school.

Perhaps the public ought to lend more of a hand. But tell that to taxpayers who are reluctant to provide more money for educational grants, health insurance, or housing subsidies for young adults. Short of giving more tangible assistance to young adults and their families, it is time to stop berating young adults for not growing up faster or criticizing their parents for helping them through a more difficult transition to adulthood. Instead, we should take solace in the fact that the family is alive and well in America today.

Frank Furstenberg, Zellerbach Family Chair of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, heads the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and is co-editor of On the Frontier of Adulthood (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Network members Connie Flanagan and Wayne Osgood are analyzing data from Monitoring the Future, a large annual survey of high school students that tracks their opinions and attitudes on a range of topics. Laura Wray, a graduate student working with Flanagan and Osgood, published this op-ed in the Washington Post based on findings from their research.

An Inconvenient Truth about Youth
Laura Wray
Washington Post, op-ed, September 11, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001133.html

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s recent movie on global warming, is now the fourth largest grossing documentary of all time. Yet, apparently it isn’t young adults who are paying the price of the ticket—or more important, taking the truth about the environment to heart. In fact, the inconvenient truth today is that youths’ willingness to conserve gas, heat, and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980s.

According to data from Monitoring the Future, a federally funded national survey on trends in the attitudes, values, and behaviors of high school seniors since 1976, there has been a clear decline in conservation behaviors among 18-year-olds over the past 27 years— although we are not yet sure whether these attitudes follow youth into adulthood. This decline, interestingly, is coupled with a rise in materialistic values.

In fact, trends in materialism and conservation are highly related: at times when youth place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to say they would conserve resources. And when youth place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to admit that resources will be scarce in the future.

Since the 1990s, the trends in materialism seem to have topped out at a steady, high level, while willingness to conserve continues to decline. These opposing values should raise a red flag about the consumer culture and its broad influence on youth.

Youth also consistently believe that government is more responsible for the environment than they are personally. Importantly, when they perceive that the government’s role in solving environmental problems is declining, so does their belief that they, personally, must do their part to save the environment.

Conservation is a collective responsibility. Likewise, in the minds of youth, their own actions to preserve the environment are inextricably linked to their perception of the government’s role in environmental conservation.

Indeed, environmental attitudes of youth seem to mirror the opinions of those in the White House at the time. The highest levels of conservation occurred in the mid- to late 1970s, at the same time that President Carter was publicly petitioning citizens to take individual responsibility in conserving resources. The steepest decline in conservation occurred during the Reagan administration, which has been widely criticized for its anti-environmental policies. Willingness to conserve enjoyed a slight surge around 1992-1993, when Clinton first took office, but this increase was short-lived (Al Gore must not have been speaking up too loudly about the environment back then).

The good news in these trends is that when government responds, so too do youth. If our country’s leaders follow the example of Al Gore and start to genuinely explore sustainable solutions, it is likely that young people will follow suit.

Political planners might also want to take note of the fact that when youth embrace conservation and pro-environmental attitudes, they are also more likely to engage in conventional politics, from writing to officials, to giving money to a political campaign, or working on a campaign.

Gore argues that in America, “political will is a renewable resource.” Perhaps one way to renew this resource is to start focusing more on young people and their understanding of, as well as contribution to, environmental problems.

Laura Wray is graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, working with members of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, Constance Flanagan and D. Wayne Osgood, in mapping the changing attitudes of young adults.

Failure to Launch or Launching Too Soon?

by Maria Kefalas

So what are your plans after graduation? As June approaches, this dreaded question not only weighs on the minds of the nation's college grads, but in the age of "Failure to Launch," it likely keeps more than a few parents awake at night.

Magazines and newspapers are full of stories about twenty-somethings who can't seem to fly the coop. Self-help books with titles such as Twenty-something, Twenty-everything, and The Quarter-Life Crisis promise guidance to young people overwhelmed at the thought of entering the "real world."

Yet, all the advice and fretting misses a crucial point. The self-focus, exploration, and perceived possibility of this time of life is a luxury reserved for only the most privileged elite—for only about 1 in 4 25-year-olds, or just about 27 percent of this age group, earn that all-important college credential which makes the freewheeling twenty-something years possible.

In contrast to the media portrayals and conventional wisdom which suggest that today's iPod generation can't leave the leave the nest, consider the findings of Penn State researcher Wayne Osgood and his colleagues. They show that many young people continue to follow the traditional route to adulthood that defined the marriage rush and baby boom decade of the 1950s.

"Fast-starters," as Osgood calls them, are the young people with modest educations and modest resources who move into full-time jobs, marriage, and their own place far sooner than their upper-class peers.

However, they do so at a price. Young people progressing at lightning speed into adulthood accomplish this by neglecting schooling. This means fast-starters acquire the markers of adulthood on the fast track, but that they risk getting get trapped between the rock and a hard place of a blue- and pink-collar labor sector where down-sizing, stagnating wages, shrinking worker's benefits, and nonexistent job mobility eat away at their chances of getting ahead. Even marriage is not as stable for this group. Fast-starters might walk down the aisle earlier in life, but their unions are more likely to end in divorce than their college educated peers.

As uncertain as things might be for the fast starters, another group faces an even more questionable future. These disconnected young adults—some estimates put this population at 14 percent of 18-24 year olds—are often neither working, nor going to school, nor active in the military. Many have aged out of foster care, bounced around in homeless shelters and spent time in juvenile detention facilities. These are our most vulnerable youth, and without support and intervention, the only road they'll take is probably the one leading to jail, or worse.

In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner wryly observes that Americans are afraid of the wrong things. And so it seems, this might be the case with the latest take on "the problem with young people today." At first glance, the highly educated, so-called millennials" might seem slow to get started, but be assured, this select minority is on target to do almost everything their parents hope and expect for them.

The true "lost generation" is the factory worker who regrets not learning more about computers, the waitress and single mom who even with a full-time job earns too little to permanently leave public assistance, or the married 23-year-old mother working the night-shift at a convenience store, too exhausted to keep up with course work for her teaching degree.

And finally, most distressingly of all, are the steadily swelling ranks of the largely male drop-outs—from high schools, community, and four-year colleges—who lack the capital (human, social, cultural and economic) to lead productive lives.

Perhaps the most important lesson for this commencement season is that we are living in an America that is profoundly unequal, and that the simultaneously harsh and mundane realities of the twenty-first century's global economy mean that a college degree determine who will become a have or have-not. Community colleges show promise as an alternative for young people not destined for a university campus, but they remain an under-used resource in creating trained workers.

We must do far more to reach out to the large numbers of youth trying to navigate this new terrain of early adulthood without the scaffolding affluent families can provide. At the end of the day, the legions of college grads moving back home while they figure out what to do after college is not something to lose sleep over. The growing numbers of young people embarking on adulthood without the education and skills they need to lead engaged and purposeful lives: that should be keeping somebody up at night.

Maria Kefalas is an associate member of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and director of the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia. She is the co-author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage.

Why Do Twenty-Somethings Move Back Home?

Ann Hulbert in Sundays’ New York Times Magazine had an interesting article on young adults —“Post-Teenage Wasteland?” Hers was one of the few to acknowledge that not all young adults are slackers. We can add a little more "background" to her column and respond to her question wondering how young people feel about being “lumped together in a limbo for laggards.” The Network has interviewed about 500 young adults in five sites across the nation. Like Hulbert, we have found little to support the claim that young people today are reluctant to grow up, but there is lots of evidence that a growing number of barriers block a smooth transition to adulthood. Here's some of them.

Why Youth Move Back Home
Compared with the generation who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, adulthood certainly comes later, but the youth who came of age a half-century ago faced vastly different circumstances. Back then, well paid, unionized jobs for working-class youth permitted a swift passage into the labor market; cheap and abundant housing, subsidized by the federal government, permitted young couples to set up their own households; and many youth with just a high school education could enter the middle class.

Today, most middle-class jobs require a college education. Secure, well paying jobs with benefits are hard to find for youth in their late teens and early twenties. (Young adults are more likely to receive health insurance in college than in the workplace.) It has become imperative to climb several rungs up the job ladder before young people are ready to establish a family.
The hazards of early marriage became all too clear in the middle of the last century when many young adults formed families before they were ready to settle down. The good news is that 20-somethings now proceed much more cautiously. They enter unions, but put off marriage until their relationships are time-tested.

Finally, many college-bound youth lack the funds to go straight through school. The cost of college has risen significantly in the last decade and the proportion of students who need financial assistance has also increased significantly. Families are footing a much larger share of college costs (college loans grew more rapidly than grants). Many youth begin college in a local institution and stay at home while they and their families put themselves through school. Add to this the rising costs of housing and the time-honored practice of moving out of home after high school has become more difficult. Living at home essentially subsidizes the costs of going to school or low-wage, entry-level jobs.

How Parents and Youth Are Adapting
How do young people and their families think about the longer period of semi-autonomy required to become self-supporting? There is no single answer. While some parents and youth welcome a slower transition to adulthood, happy to help out in the face of steeper educational and employment requirements, others lament the changes and wish that young adults could speed up the transition to adulthood, even if they recognize that the problem lies not with the motivation of their children but the support provided by the larger society.

Of course, some young people find themselves stuck in the parental nest, and some parents are resentful of their child’s inability to move out on his or her own. However, there is no evidence that this is a common issue for many families. The vast majority of youth are working or in school (or often both), hardly signs of a failure to take themselves or their circumstances responsibly. Those young people who get stuck frequently are those who would falter whether or not they were living independently of their parents.
And, we must not forget about those youth who lack the family support to help them while they acquire education, work skills, and find a foothold in the labor market. A growing number of young adults are being released from the foster care or juvenile justice system with no place to call home.

What to Do: Self-Reliance coupled with Social Supports
Independence is highly prized in American culture. We are a nation that believes it is up to individuals to make their own fortunes. Hence, we are inclined to put the blame on those who too readily accept help—even from their own families—and we are inclined to castigate parents who provide help to young adults who in an earlier age might have been out on their own.

There are considerable advantages to our cultural emphasis on self-reliance and our abhorrence of dependency. At the same time, perhaps the balance in American society is now so skewed in the direction of individual motivation that we are missing the huge shift that has occurred in the social ecology. It is almost as if we have lost perspective: individual motivation and social support are not opposites, but rather work in tandem to reproduce the social order. If our institutional support for young adults relies exclusively on the family’s good will, we are likely to overtax the capacities of families while we undernourish the next generation of workers, family members, and citizens.