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Media | Policymakers | Researchers
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How Do Youth Perceive Adulthood: Have Aspirations Changed?
A Snapshot of American High Four Decades:
1976, 1985, 1994, and 2001 Drawing from their work analyzing Monitoring the Future data, Flanagan and Osgood examine how high school seniors's views have changed since the 1970s on topics such as educational aspirations, goals for life and work, views on relationships, their trust in government and other institutions, and more. Becoming Adult: Meanings and Markers for Young Americans Against the protracted and ever more fragmented transition, against patterns that suggest significant uncertainty about experiences and opportunities that lay ahead, and against longer reliance on others for support, how do young people come to think about themselves as “adults”? This chapter seeks to understand young adults’ perspectives on what adulthood means, what experiences or statuses mark it, and how adult identities are achieved. The first section turns to themes of the salience and meanings of chronological age as a marker in this process, especially in getting the process started. The second section then develops a set of themes related to the gradual nature of the transition to adulthood and its implications for identity-building in early adulthood. The chapter draws on in-depth interviews with young people from all four of the settings discussed in prior chapters this book: New York City, San Diego, Minneapolis, and rural Iowa. An overview of the four samples and research designs is provided in the opening chapter. The Changing Social Contract at the Transition to Adulthood How comfortable are young adults with the flux that is now a part of their lives? What are their views on jobs, marriage, and their contribution to society? Constance Flanagan and her coauthors analyze data from a large survey of high school seniors and find that they are increasingly comfortable with change. Young adults, rather than marrying right away, expect to live with their partner first. They increasingly value work as a source of status but not as a career or a means to contribute to society, and as a whole, they are more materialistic, and less interested in politics and current events. They also examine the ramifications of these views on the American polity and social contract. What Marks Adulthood—Subjective Identity or Demographic Markers? Are traditional social roles or subjective, personal markers of responsibility are more likely to denote adult status today? Although the traditional markers of entry to adulthood such as completing school, leaving home, starting a career, marrying, and having children are still important to a young person’s sense of adulthood, Michael Shanahan, Erik Porfeli, and Jeylan Mortimer, in their chapter in On the Frontier of Adulthood, also find that individualistic and subjective indicators such as a sense of autonomy, financial independence, self-control, and personal responsibility are also important. In denoting if and when a young person has achieved adulthood, it appears that a blend of roles and responsibilities should be used. Between Adolescence and Adulthood: Expectations about the Timing of Adulthood In the period following World War II, adulthood came early to most Americans. The vast majority of Americans had assumed adult roles by their late teens or early 20s. Today, it takes much longer to make the transition to adulthood: adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. Frank F. Furstenberg et al., find that although Americans believe that the transition to adulthood will begin in the late teens or early 20s, they have accepted that it often extends through the late 20s. The definition of adulthood that emerges from the GSS includes being financially independent, leaving home, completing school, and working full-time. Nearly half of Americans viewed marriage and parenthood, once defining markers of adulthood, as unimportant for the attainment of adult status. Subjective Perceptions of Adulthood among Urban Youth: Are Demographic
Transitions Still Relevant? Using data from the Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study (PELS), this paper examines the relative effects of specific adult-like transitions and responsibilities on urban youth’s self-perceived adulthood.The authors investigate young adults' subjective view of their adult status as well as their actual transitions and responsibilities at age 19 and then again at age 21. They also examine the extent to which changes in adult-like roles and responsibilities explain changes in one’s subjective adulthood status over time. Although we find a significant increase in the percentage of young adults both crossing demographic transitions and taking on individual responsibilities over the two-year period, only changes in sociodemographic transitions significantly predict changes in self-perceived adulthood. In particular, moving out on one’s own and having a child significantly increase the odds of one perceiving herself as fully an adult. We also find that positive changes in labor market position significantly predict changes in adulthood status, but these effects are conditional on experiencing changes in other transitions as well. The Generation Gap Revisited Today’s young adults are more pessimistic, mistrustful, and disconnected than their parents. Yet, even with these changes, Tom W. Smith, in On the Frontier of Adulthood, finds that the gap between youth of today and their parents isn’t necessarily larger than the gap between previous generations of children and parents. Rather today’s young adults travel through a largely similar process of maturing, involving the same key institutions of family, education, and employers, albeit in changing patterns. Why do Twenty-Somethings Move Back Home? 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 blame young adults who too readily accept help—even from their own families—and to castigate parents who provide it. The Network Blog from October 2005 argues that, in addition to the changing job market and educational requirements, young people’s changing attitudes about marriage and autonomy may be responsible in part for their move back home. Straight from the Heartland: Coming of Age in Ellis, Iowa Carr and Kefalas draw on their in-depth interviews with young adults in rural Iowa to weave a story of why some leave home, and often the state, why others stay, and how the role the community plays in shaping young adults lives. Their find that youths' early work histories, their family, teachers and guidance counselors, and their own ambitions, abilities, and proclivities all come together to shape these decisions to leave, stay, and sometimes return. For their own lives, the decisions can mean a more traditional route through young adulthood, as demonstrated by the Stayers and their nearly lockstep path through the markers of adulthood: finishing high school, leaving home, finding a job, marrying, and starting a family, in that order. For those who leave, the decision can lead them along a more circuitous path that more closely mirrors the path taken by many young adults today, as documented by other researchers from the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. However, as the paths themselves reveal, all of these youth, because of the many more options available to them in today’s world, and paradoxically, because of the region’s own economic and social traditionalism, pull and push them in different directions, along a variety of routes to adulthood. The New Adulthood?
The Transition to Adulthood from the Perspective of Transitioning Young Adults What do “transitioning” young adults know and think about themselves and their lives as they move into “traditional” adult roles, those of worker, partner/spouse, and parent? Are they aware of the ways in which their experiences are different from their parents? Do they think of themselves as being in a distinct life phase or period? Do they assign any particular meaning and significance to it? What challenges and obstacles do they believe stand in their way? These are some of the questions Hartmann and Swartz explore as they draw from in-depth interviews with young adults in Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota. Growing Up in the Big City: The
Transitions to Adulthood in New York These excerpts from a chapter in a forthcoming Network book focus on the ways in which the high cost and low availability of housing in New York City affects the transition to adulthood. How do the high costs of housing and the tendency to remain living with family of origin affect the sense of independence and maturity among young people? How does the desire to live independently affect the other transitions to adulthood, such as marriage, completing an education, and finding full-time work? Similarly, what does the diversity of immigrant, racial, and ethnic backgrounds in New York mean for young people as they enter adulthood? Michigan: Making Their Way—Regret, Hope, and Identity Pursuits in Motor City Motor City, a mix of urban, suburban, and rural connected by a web of highways with cars and car culture tying it all together. During its boom, people from across the country and world were drawn to the Detroit and its environs for its promise of the good life, backed by a strong working class. Today, that working class and the unions that supported it are challenged. The auto industry hit a rough patch beginning in the early 1980s, when our group of young adults, now age 30, were just entering adolescence. Yet, the pull of the Big Three still exerts a strong influence on their psyches and adult work options. Therefore, we ask in this paper, In the first generation of decline in the manufacturing sector, how exactly are young adults making it in the Motor City? Perhaps more than in other sites, our respondents express regret for not pursuing higher education. Reflecting the changing times, when factory work no longer offers a solid middle-class living, the youth sometimes wish they’d had clearer goals in high school and followed through with them into college. Even those who did succeed in college were often motivated to attend to avoid the fate of their parents, who were often struggling financially. We also see more traditional gender roles (women focused on family, men on careers) during the transition to adulthood in Michigan, comparing more closely with Iowa and its rural youth than, for example, to the New York or San Diego young adults. Marriage is More than Being Together: The Meaning of Marriage among Young Adults in the United States Is marriage in the United States in trouble? This paper goes beyond the confines of census and survey data to explore what young adults think about marriage. It draws evidence from a large, qualitative study sponsored by theNetwork, a diverse population of several hundred men and women in their 20s and early 30s who are currently navigating the passage to adulthood. The authors examine the ways that social class, community context, ethnic background, and gender are linked to how young adults construct their hopes and expectations for relationships, whether marriage is a likely prospect in their future, and, if so, the conditions under which they foresee entering into matrimony. Within a social world where young people do not have to marry if they want to engage in engage in sexual relations, cohabit, or bear children: what purpose does it now serve? Paths Into Adulthood, Well-Being, and Substance Use The years of early adulthood can be both exciting and stressful as youth try on a variety of different roles, and as expectations grow and change. John Schulenberg et al. find in their chapter in On the Frontier of Adulthood that, contrary to past research with younger adolescents, the more roles and transitions older adolescents juggle after high school, the greater their well-being. Also, the degree of well-being in the senior year of high school likely sets the stage for the type and pattern of transitions after high school. Substance use in early adulthood, unlike in adolescence, is not correlated with well-being, but rather, is influenced by one’s post-high school circumstances.
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