The rocky road to adulthood

American Demographics, May, 1996 by Marcia Mogelonsky

SUMMARY

More than one-fifth of 25-year-old Americans still live with their parents, and the definition of adulthood is no longer clear. The full-nest syndrome is more common among whites than other races, and many adult children are free to spend their wages on luxuries without paying rent. While few kids want to stay home forever, more of them aren't leaving home without good reasons.

Twenty-nine-year-old George Brown considers himself an adult. He has a wife, a steady job, and a healthy income. But unlike a lot of adults, George still lives at home. He lived at home while he attended the local community college. He stayed there when he got his first job. Now married for three years, he and his 25-year-old wife live in the basement of the house in which he grew up. His parents live upstairs.

"We don't pay any rent," says Brown. "My parents say they don't want us to. But we pay our own expenses, and we do help out in all sorts of ways. We drive my parents to appointments, help with shopping, do repairs, things like that."

Brown and his wife are both employed full time. By not paying rent, they have ample discretionary income to spend as they see fit. They have two new cars and season tickets to every home game for their city's baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams.

While Brown never left home at all, Joseph Cassano, a 29-year-old from Wantagh, New York, went to college and returned home after two years. "I decided to switch majors, and as it turned out, the school I wanted to go to was right near my home. So I moved back in with my parents while I finished my degree." Cassano got a job after college and continued to live at home. He finally left when he got married two years ago. "There's a lot of stability associated with living at home. You don't have to worry about meals or things like that. It gave me a real sense of security," says Cassano. "I paid rent the entire time I lived at home, but I was still able to save enough money to buy a house as soon as I got married and moved out."

Getting married has never been the primary reason for American men to leave their parents' homes, although it used to be the primary reason for women to leave home. Some young people still leave home to get married, but others do so to go to school, join the military, take a job, move into a nonmarital living situation, or simply be on their own. Even with all of these choices - or perhaps because of them - young adults are waiting longer than their parents did to venture out of the nest. Some young adults who do leave are circling back, at least for a while. The result is that young Americans are following a winding path toward the residential and financial state of self-sufficiency that many consider the true definition of adulthood.

DEFINING ADULTHOOD

Pinning down the threshold to adulthood is about as difficult as pinning Jell-O to a wall. Children may become adults anywhere between the ages of 12 and 25, depending on how you define adulthood. It could be the age at which a person can drive or rent a car, vote, be drafted for military service, chink or purchase alcohol, get married, or have an abortion without parental consent, to name just a few rites of passage.

Many societies mark the onset of adulthood at puberty, with the assumption that people who are old enough to reproduce are old enough to deal with parental and other adult responsibilities. Religious ceremonies such as Jewish bar and bat mitzvahs are derived from this tradition, and they celebrate a child's transition to adulthood in the early teen years. But modern American life acknowledges an interim life stage known as adolescence. During the murky depths of this confusing time, a myriad of definitions mark adulthood at a variety of ages.

A host of age-specific parameters mark the transition from child to adult, even within specific areas. In the world of aviation, a 17-year-old can hold a private pilot's license, a 15-year-old is "adult" enough to sit in an emergency adult row and assist in evacuating the craft, and some airlines have determined that 12-year-olds are "adult" enough to travel unaccompanied.

Sometimes the age of majority for one situation contradicts another. In 1990, more than 50,000 U.S. teenagers got married before age 18, legally condoning their participation in intimate activities before they were allowed to watch them in X-rated movies. Americans can buy cars before they can drive them, and they can do both of those things long before they are ordinarily eligible to rent them.

Distinguishing between childhood and adulthood got even more complicated when baby boomers reached the end of their teenage years starting in the late 1960s. You must put the childhood/adulthood definitions in historical perspective," says Frances Goldscheider, professor of sociology at Brown University. "The difficulty we are currently having in determining re adulthood starts stems from the Vietnam era, when the age of majority was lowered from 21 to 18."

The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1971, guaranteeing the right to vote to citizens aged 18 and older. It's no coincidence that in 1971, 18-year-olds were being drafted in record numbers. Before shipping out, they were marrying almost as quickly. "The rational at the time was: `These kids are fighting and dying; their wives are having babies. Why can't they vote?'" says Goldscheider