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Growing Ups
Living with your parents, single and with no clear career. Is this a failure to grow up or a whole new stage of life?
by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett
17 April 2014
Aeon Magazine
Excerpt:
...
One of the most common insults to today’s emerging adults is that they’re lazy. According to this view, young people are ‘slackers’ who avoid work whenever possible, preferring to sponge off their parents for as long as they can get away with it. One of the reasons they avoid real work is that have an inflated sense of entitlement. They expect work to be fun, and if it’s not fun, they refuse to do it.
It’s true that emerging adults have high hopes for work, and even, yes, a sense of being entitled to enjoy their work. Ian, a 22-year-old who was interviewed for my 2004 book, chose to go into journalism, even though he knew that: ‘If I’m a journalist making $20,000 a year, my dad [a wealthy physician] makes vastly more than that.’ More important than the money was finding a job that he could love. ‘If I enjoy thoroughly doing what I’m doing in life, then I would be better off than my dad.’ Emerging adults enter the workplace seeking what I call identity-based work, meaning a job that will be a source of self-fulfillment and make the most of their talents and interests. They want a job that they will look forward to doing when they get up each morning.
You might think that this is not a realistic expectation for work, and you are right. But keep in mind it was their parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, who invented the idea that work should be fun. No one had ever thought so before. Baby Boomers rejected the traditional assumption that work was a dreary but unavoidable part of the human condition. They declared that they didn’t want to spend their lives simply slaving away – and their children grew up in this new world, assuming that work should be meaningful and self-fulfilling. Now that those children are emerging adults, their Baby Boomer parents and employers grumble at their presumptuousness.
So, yes, emerging adults today have high and often unrealistic expectations for work, but lazy? That’s laughably false. While they look for their elusive dream job, they don’t simply sit around and play video games and update their Facebook page all day. The great majority of them spend most of their twenties in a series of unglamorous, low-paying jobs as they search for something better. The average American holds ten different jobs between the ages of 18 and 29, and most of them are the kinds of jobs that promise little respect and less money. Have you noticed who is waiting on your table at the restaurant, working the counter at the retail store, stocking the shelves at the supermarket? Most of them are emerging adults. Many of them are working and attending school at the same time, trying to make ends meet while they strive to move up the ladder. It’s unfair to tar the many hard-working emerging adults with a stereotype that is true for only a small percentage of them.
Is striving for identity-based work only for the middle class and the wealthy, who have the advantages in American society? Yes and no. The aspiration stretches across social classes: in the national Clark poll, 79 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is more important for me to enjoy my job than to make a lot of money,’ and there were no differences across social class backgrounds (represented by mother’s education). However, the reality is quite different from the aspiration. Young Americans from lower social class backgrounds are far less likely than those from higher social backgrounds to obtain a college education and, without a college degree, jobs of any kind are scarce in the modern information-based economy. The current US unemployment rate is twice as high for those with only a high-school degree or less than it is for those with a four-year college degree. In the national Clark poll, emerging adults from lower social class backgrounds were far more likely than their more advantaged peers to agree that ‘I have not been able to find enough financial support to get the education I need.’ That’s not their fault. It is the fault of their society which short-sightedly fails to fund education and training adequately, and thereby squanders the potential and aspirations of the young.
Another widespread slur against emerging adults is that they are selfish. Some American researchers – most notoriously Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and a well-known writer and speaker – claim that young people today have grown more ‘narcissistic’ compared with their equivalents 30 or 40 years ago. This claim is based mainly on surveys of college students that show increased levels of self-esteem. Today’s students are more likely than in the past to agree with statements such as: ‘I am an important person.’
With this stereotype, too, there is a grain of truth that has been vastly overblown. It’s probably true that most emerging adults today grow up with a higher level of self-esteem than in previous generations. Their Baby Boomer parents have been telling them from the cradle onward: ‘You’re special!’ ‘You can be whatever you want to be!’ ‘Dream big dreams!’ and the like. Popular culture has reinforced these messages, in movies, television shows and songs. Well, they actually believed it. In the national Clark poll, nearly all 18- to 29-year-olds (89 per cent) agreed with the statement: ‘I am confident that eventually I will get what I want out of life.’
But – and this is the key point – that doesn’t mean they’re selfish. It certainly doesn’t mean they are a generation of narcissists. It simply means that they are highly confident in their abilities to make a good life for themselves, whatever obstacles they might face. Would we prefer that they cringed before the challenges of adulthood? I have come to see their high self-esteem and confidence as good psychological armour for entering a tough adult world. Most people get knocked down more than once in the course of their 20s, by love, by work, by any number of dream bubbles that are popped by rude reality. High self-esteem is what allows them to get up again and continue moving forward. For example, Nicole, 25, grew up in poverty as the oldest of four children in a household with a mentally disabled mother and no father. Her goals for her life have been repeatedly delayed or driven off track by her family responsibilities. Nevertheless, she is pursuing a college degree and is determined to reach her ultimate goal of getting a PhD. Her self-belief is what has enabled her to overcome a chaotic childhood full of disadvantages. ‘It’s like, the more you come at me, the stronger I’m going to be,’ she told me when I interviewed her for my 2004 book.
The ‘selfish’ slur also ignores how idealistic and generous-hearted today’s emerging adults are. In the national Clark poll, 86 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is important to me to have a career that does some good in the world.’ And it is not just an idealistic aspiration: they are, in fact, more likely to volunteer their time and energy for serving others than their parents did at the same age, according to national surveys by the US Higher Education Research Institute.
As for the claim that they never want to grow up, it’s true that entering the full range of adult responsibilities comes later than it did before, in terms of completing education and entering marriage and parenthood. Many emerging adults are ambivalent about adulthood and in no hurry to get there. In the national Clark poll, 35 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed with the statement: ‘If I could have my way, I would never become an adult.’ That’s not a majority, but it’s a lot, and that 35 per cent is probably the basis of the stereotype.
Adulthood is full of onerous responsibilities, as all of us who have been there for a while know well: going to work every day, making the meals, keeping the household reasonably clean and orderly, paying the bills. It doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun to most young people. Gerard, a guitarist and singer in a rock band, told me that, at 27: ‘I feel like I’m kind of teetering on the brink of adulthood, you know. I guess in some ways I feel like it and other ways I don’t. I associate being an adult with being really boring, and I just don’t feel quite that boring yet.’
Despite their ambivalence, by the age of 30 the great majority of emerging adults have a marriage partner, at least one child, and a stable long-term job. Most of the rest will reach these milestones some time in their early 30s. So, it’s not true that they never grow up. Most of them just don’t want to take on the yoke of adult responsibilities in their early 20s. They would rather use the flexibility of their 20s for the kinds of exploration they couldn’t have pursued when they were younger, and won’t be able to do later – go to a different part of the country or the world to live for a while, try to break in to a glamorous but long-shot profession such as music or acting, or simply work in a low-pay, low-stress job for a while and have a lot of fun with friends. They want to make use of their freedom while they have the chance. That’s not contemptible, it’s wise, and we don’t give them enough credit for their wisdom. By age 30, nearly all of them are more than ready to trade their footloose freedom for the rewards of enduring bonds to others.
Despite all of this good news about the rising generation, an especially popular negative stereotype of emerging adults today is that they are worse than ever, far inferior to young people of a generation or two ago. Many ageing Baby Boomers contrast today’s emerging adults unfavourably with the 1960s and ’70s, when they were young. There is a widespread belief in US society that young people are apathetic, irresponsible and immoral. In a 2009 national survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 per cent agreed that ‘older people’ have ‘better values’ than ‘younger people’. Even a majority of the 18- to 29-year-olds agreed.
Oddly, this stereotype persists even though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On a variety of indicators, young people have gotten better, not worse over the past decades. Rates of violent crime committed by young men are now less than half the level of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s. Automobile fatalities have long been the main cause of death among young Americans in the late teens and early 20s, but rates have declined by almost half in the past 20 years. The birth rate for 18- to 19-year-old women has declined by about 25 per cent since the early 1990s, and among African Americans it has dropped by nearly half.
Not only have bad things gone down, but good things about this generation have gone up. Nearly 90 per cent of American college freshmen reported doing volunteer work in the past year, the highest level ever, according to the annual national survey of tens of thousands of first-year college students conducted by the US Higher Education Research Institute. Furthermore, applications to post-college volunteer programmes such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Teach for America have reached record levels.
Young Americans are also more tolerant and accepting of diversity than older generations, including race and sexual orientation. According to a national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, young Americans (ages 18-29) are more likely than any older age group to say they ‘would be fine with a family member’s marriage to someone of any other race/ethnicity’. Among whites, 88 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed, compared with 52 per cent of 50- to 64-year-olds and just 36 per cent of those aged 65 and older. The same study also found that interracial friendships were most common among the young.
Young Americans are much more accepting of variations in sexual orientation than their elders. According to various Pew surveys, the proportion of Americans who agree that ‘same-sex sexual relations are always wrong’ is 78 per cent for those born before 1928 but only 43 per cent for those born since 1981. This and other surveys also find that young Americans are far more likely than older Americans to believe that same-sex marriage should be legal.
The open and accepting attitudes of young Americans extend beyond the borders of the US. The survey researcher John Zogby calls today’s 18- to 29-year-olds the ‘first globals’ because his data indicate that they see themselves as citizens of the world and are more devoted than older generations to addressing global problems. Zogby concludes that the current generation of young people is more globally engaged than members of any previous generation in US history. For example, 56 per cent of those aged 18-29 have friends or family living outside the US, higher than any older group; and a third of them have travelled outside the US in the past five years. We might reasonably hope that this portends more harmonious international relations in their lifetimes than their parents and grandparents have experienced.
<Read More>
Living with your parents, single and with no clear career. Is this a failure to grow up or a whole new stage of life?
by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett
17 April 2014
Aeon Magazine
Excerpt:
...
One of the most common insults to today’s emerging adults is that they’re lazy. According to this view, young people are ‘slackers’ who avoid work whenever possible, preferring to sponge off their parents for as long as they can get away with it. One of the reasons they avoid real work is that have an inflated sense of entitlement. They expect work to be fun, and if it’s not fun, they refuse to do it.
It’s true that emerging adults have high hopes for work, and even, yes, a sense of being entitled to enjoy their work. Ian, a 22-year-old who was interviewed for my 2004 book, chose to go into journalism, even though he knew that: ‘If I’m a journalist making $20,000 a year, my dad [a wealthy physician] makes vastly more than that.’ More important than the money was finding a job that he could love. ‘If I enjoy thoroughly doing what I’m doing in life, then I would be better off than my dad.’ Emerging adults enter the workplace seeking what I call identity-based work, meaning a job that will be a source of self-fulfillment and make the most of their talents and interests. They want a job that they will look forward to doing when they get up each morning.
You might think that this is not a realistic expectation for work, and you are right. But keep in mind it was their parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, who invented the idea that work should be fun. No one had ever thought so before. Baby Boomers rejected the traditional assumption that work was a dreary but unavoidable part of the human condition. They declared that they didn’t want to spend their lives simply slaving away – and their children grew up in this new world, assuming that work should be meaningful and self-fulfilling. Now that those children are emerging adults, their Baby Boomer parents and employers grumble at their presumptuousness.
So, yes, emerging adults today have high and often unrealistic expectations for work, but lazy? That’s laughably false. While they look for their elusive dream job, they don’t simply sit around and play video games and update their Facebook page all day. The great majority of them spend most of their twenties in a series of unglamorous, low-paying jobs as they search for something better. The average American holds ten different jobs between the ages of 18 and 29, and most of them are the kinds of jobs that promise little respect and less money. Have you noticed who is waiting on your table at the restaurant, working the counter at the retail store, stocking the shelves at the supermarket? Most of them are emerging adults. Many of them are working and attending school at the same time, trying to make ends meet while they strive to move up the ladder. It’s unfair to tar the many hard-working emerging adults with a stereotype that is true for only a small percentage of them.
Is striving for identity-based work only for the middle class and the wealthy, who have the advantages in American society? Yes and no. The aspiration stretches across social classes: in the national Clark poll, 79 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is more important for me to enjoy my job than to make a lot of money,’ and there were no differences across social class backgrounds (represented by mother’s education). However, the reality is quite different from the aspiration. Young Americans from lower social class backgrounds are far less likely than those from higher social backgrounds to obtain a college education and, without a college degree, jobs of any kind are scarce in the modern information-based economy. The current US unemployment rate is twice as high for those with only a high-school degree or less than it is for those with a four-year college degree. In the national Clark poll, emerging adults from lower social class backgrounds were far more likely than their more advantaged peers to agree that ‘I have not been able to find enough financial support to get the education I need.’ That’s not their fault. It is the fault of their society which short-sightedly fails to fund education and training adequately, and thereby squanders the potential and aspirations of the young.
Another widespread slur against emerging adults is that they are selfish. Some American researchers – most notoriously Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and a well-known writer and speaker – claim that young people today have grown more ‘narcissistic’ compared with their equivalents 30 or 40 years ago. This claim is based mainly on surveys of college students that show increased levels of self-esteem. Today’s students are more likely than in the past to agree with statements such as: ‘I am an important person.’
With this stereotype, too, there is a grain of truth that has been vastly overblown. It’s probably true that most emerging adults today grow up with a higher level of self-esteem than in previous generations. Their Baby Boomer parents have been telling them from the cradle onward: ‘You’re special!’ ‘You can be whatever you want to be!’ ‘Dream big dreams!’ and the like. Popular culture has reinforced these messages, in movies, television shows and songs. Well, they actually believed it. In the national Clark poll, nearly all 18- to 29-year-olds (89 per cent) agreed with the statement: ‘I am confident that eventually I will get what I want out of life.’
But – and this is the key point – that doesn’t mean they’re selfish. It certainly doesn’t mean they are a generation of narcissists. It simply means that they are highly confident in their abilities to make a good life for themselves, whatever obstacles they might face. Would we prefer that they cringed before the challenges of adulthood? I have come to see their high self-esteem and confidence as good psychological armour for entering a tough adult world. Most people get knocked down more than once in the course of their 20s, by love, by work, by any number of dream bubbles that are popped by rude reality. High self-esteem is what allows them to get up again and continue moving forward. For example, Nicole, 25, grew up in poverty as the oldest of four children in a household with a mentally disabled mother and no father. Her goals for her life have been repeatedly delayed or driven off track by her family responsibilities. Nevertheless, she is pursuing a college degree and is determined to reach her ultimate goal of getting a PhD. Her self-belief is what has enabled her to overcome a chaotic childhood full of disadvantages. ‘It’s like, the more you come at me, the stronger I’m going to be,’ she told me when I interviewed her for my 2004 book.
The ‘selfish’ slur also ignores how idealistic and generous-hearted today’s emerging adults are. In the national Clark poll, 86 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is important to me to have a career that does some good in the world.’ And it is not just an idealistic aspiration: they are, in fact, more likely to volunteer their time and energy for serving others than their parents did at the same age, according to national surveys by the US Higher Education Research Institute.
As for the claim that they never want to grow up, it’s true that entering the full range of adult responsibilities comes later than it did before, in terms of completing education and entering marriage and parenthood. Many emerging adults are ambivalent about adulthood and in no hurry to get there. In the national Clark poll, 35 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed with the statement: ‘If I could have my way, I would never become an adult.’ That’s not a majority, but it’s a lot, and that 35 per cent is probably the basis of the stereotype.
Adulthood is full of onerous responsibilities, as all of us who have been there for a while know well: going to work every day, making the meals, keeping the household reasonably clean and orderly, paying the bills. It doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun to most young people. Gerard, a guitarist and singer in a rock band, told me that, at 27: ‘I feel like I’m kind of teetering on the brink of adulthood, you know. I guess in some ways I feel like it and other ways I don’t. I associate being an adult with being really boring, and I just don’t feel quite that boring yet.’
Despite their ambivalence, by the age of 30 the great majority of emerging adults have a marriage partner, at least one child, and a stable long-term job. Most of the rest will reach these milestones some time in their early 30s. So, it’s not true that they never grow up. Most of them just don’t want to take on the yoke of adult responsibilities in their early 20s. They would rather use the flexibility of their 20s for the kinds of exploration they couldn’t have pursued when they were younger, and won’t be able to do later – go to a different part of the country or the world to live for a while, try to break in to a glamorous but long-shot profession such as music or acting, or simply work in a low-pay, low-stress job for a while and have a lot of fun with friends. They want to make use of their freedom while they have the chance. That’s not contemptible, it’s wise, and we don’t give them enough credit for their wisdom. By age 30, nearly all of them are more than ready to trade their footloose freedom for the rewards of enduring bonds to others.
Despite all of this good news about the rising generation, an especially popular negative stereotype of emerging adults today is that they are worse than ever, far inferior to young people of a generation or two ago. Many ageing Baby Boomers contrast today’s emerging adults unfavourably with the 1960s and ’70s, when they were young. There is a widespread belief in US society that young people are apathetic, irresponsible and immoral. In a 2009 national survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 per cent agreed that ‘older people’ have ‘better values’ than ‘younger people’. Even a majority of the 18- to 29-year-olds agreed.
Oddly, this stereotype persists even though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On a variety of indicators, young people have gotten better, not worse over the past decades. Rates of violent crime committed by young men are now less than half the level of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s. Automobile fatalities have long been the main cause of death among young Americans in the late teens and early 20s, but rates have declined by almost half in the past 20 years. The birth rate for 18- to 19-year-old women has declined by about 25 per cent since the early 1990s, and among African Americans it has dropped by nearly half.
Not only have bad things gone down, but good things about this generation have gone up. Nearly 90 per cent of American college freshmen reported doing volunteer work in the past year, the highest level ever, according to the annual national survey of tens of thousands of first-year college students conducted by the US Higher Education Research Institute. Furthermore, applications to post-college volunteer programmes such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Teach for America have reached record levels.
Young Americans are also more tolerant and accepting of diversity than older generations, including race and sexual orientation. According to a national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, young Americans (ages 18-29) are more likely than any older age group to say they ‘would be fine with a family member’s marriage to someone of any other race/ethnicity’. Among whites, 88 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed, compared with 52 per cent of 50- to 64-year-olds and just 36 per cent of those aged 65 and older. The same study also found that interracial friendships were most common among the young.
Young Americans are much more accepting of variations in sexual orientation than their elders. According to various Pew surveys, the proportion of Americans who agree that ‘same-sex sexual relations are always wrong’ is 78 per cent for those born before 1928 but only 43 per cent for those born since 1981. This and other surveys also find that young Americans are far more likely than older Americans to believe that same-sex marriage should be legal.
The open and accepting attitudes of young Americans extend beyond the borders of the US. The survey researcher John Zogby calls today’s 18- to 29-year-olds the ‘first globals’ because his data indicate that they see themselves as citizens of the world and are more devoted than older generations to addressing global problems. Zogby concludes that the current generation of young people is more globally engaged than members of any previous generation in US history. For example, 56 per cent of those aged 18-29 have friends or family living outside the US, higher than any older group; and a third of them have travelled outside the US in the past five years. We might reasonably hope that this portends more harmonious international relations in their lifetimes than their parents and grandparents have experienced.
<Read More>
