You can vote when you’re 18 and drink when you’re 21. But when do you really become an adult?

Download audio

Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett says people in their 20s are in a different life-stage than people in their 30s. He coined the term “emerging adulthood” to describe the years between adolescence and full adulthood.  Producer Flora Lichtman met up with him to hear more.

MORE AUDIO from TRBQ:

Subscribe the to the TRBQ podcast on iTunes.

Listen to the TRBQ podcast on Stitcher.

Follow TRBQ on SoundCloud.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

(Music)

OLSHER:

I’m Dean Olsher. And this is the The Really Big Questions, the podcast that asks — you guessed it — big questions. Like what it means to be an adult. Research shows that how we define adulthood has changed in recent years. Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett says that historically, almost all cultures defined adulthood through marriage. Today, not so much. In a national survey asking which of 40 criteria are most important for adulthood, Arnett finds a different answer.

ARNETT:

Marriage consistently ends up near rock bottom.

OLSHER:

How are we redefining adulthood? TRBQ producer Flora Lichtman investigates.

LICHTMAN:

I’m out pounding the pavement to see if my neighbors can help us think through our big question du jour. What does it mean to be an adult?

PERSON 1: That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about actually. For me, it’s have I developed myself enough as a person.

PERSON 2:

I don’t really know yet, because I’m not an adult myself.

LICHTMAN:

How old are you?

PERSON 2:

I’m 18.

PERSON 3:

I’m not an adult yet. I still think I’m a kid. I’m 65!

PERSON 4:

What does it mean to be an adult? To be responsible?

PERSON 5:

Be responsible.

PERSON 6:

Independent, responsible and respectful.

LICHTMAN:

That last answer – being independent and responsible – is pretty representative of what most people in America think. So says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. and co-author of “Getting to Thirty.” And he would know.

ARNETT:

I’ve been doing research on this question for 20 years now and I’ve found remarkable consistency in how people think about adulthood and how they conceptualize it across ages, across genders, across social class groups, across ethnic groups. The top three, I call them the big three, are accepting responsibility for yourself, making independent decisions, and becoming financially independent. Those are remarkably consistent across many studies by now.

LICHTMAN:

You’ve tracked in the last 20 years I think a real change in how people conceive of adulthood. We hear a lot about the millennial generation bucking norms for adulthood, pushing back these traditional markers.

ARNETT:

Yeah, 20 years ago, the median marriage age was three or four years earlier than it is now, and it’s just continued to rise. And the same with the median age of entering parenthood. And I was pointing at the time to how higher education had expanded so much, and that was another thing that seemed to make adulthood later. Well, by now, it’s expanded far more, making even more there’s a period of emerging adulthood as I call it in-between adolescence and young adulthood. It’s really a distinct life stage, now, I think.

LICHTMAN:

Right. You’ve argued that this time period, it’s basically your 20s, right?

ARNETT:

Yeah, basically.

LICHTMAN:

Is this new stage of life called emerging adulthood. And I was curious, how does that fit in with biology? When we think about stages of life, are they constructs that we impose on our life or is there some biological underpinning? How do those two things fit together?

ARNETT:

That’s a question that some scholars have raised about my theory and about my ideas. They’ve said, “Wait a minute, stages have to be universal. They have to take place for everyone, everywhere. And they also have to be uniform.” Because that’s traditionally how we’ve thought about stages. I mean, Freud’s stages of psychosexual development in childhood and Erikson’s stages of the life span, Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.

They all were proposed to be universal and biologically based. But what I’ve argued is they were all wrong. I mean, we all recognize that they vastly overstated the universality of their theories based on very small local samples. What I’m arguing is stages are useful as long as you don’t claim that they’re universal, because they almost never are. Infancy is about the one life stage I think you can say is really biologically based. You can’t walk and you can’t talk for the first year of life. That’s true everywhere.

But all the other ones, I think, they’re frameworks that we use to understand our development and the development of those around us. And I think once you understand them as social constructions, then emerging adulthood makes sense as a life stage for our time.

LICHTMAN:

One of the adulthood themes we keep hearing about are 20-somethings moving back home with their parents–often for financial reasons. And one of Arnett’s most interesting findings is that parents seem to be kind of happy about this.

ARNETT:

Yeah. You know, it’s remarkable how happy they are, because we have this sort of cultural narrative if you will in American society that parents can’t wait for their kids to leave. And if the kids do come back in their 20s, then the parents are saying “Oh, no, how could this happen? When are you moving out again?”

It’s funny how common that is as a cultural narrative, and it’s funny especially because it bears almost no relation to reality.

(Sounds of family dining)

LICHTMAN:

The Goonan family in Marine Park, Brooklyn seems to make the point. They graciously let me join Sunday night dinner last summer. A weekly family ritual.

B GOONAN:

Usually we have several people over. Her brother, my sister.

LICHTMAN:

That is Bill Goonan. He’s married to Marion. And their daughter Danielle is here too.

D GOONAN:

Sometimes we try to get her to make something other than meat sauce, but it’s rare.

LICHTMAN:

Danielle, 29, has a good job. She’s lived alone before, doing a Fullbright in Italy and graduate studies at the London School of Economics. But when she landed a job in New York, she decided to live at home — seemingly very much by choice.

D GOONAN:

I like my parents. When I was at school I spoke to my mother every single day. I had friends who didn’t speak to their parents for months on end at college and for me that was the weirdest thing. It’s how you’re raised I guess.

B GOONAN:

I think it makes a lot of sense if you get along with your parents.

D GOONAN:

We’re an Italian-American family. It’s normal to live at home until you’re married. My mother did it. He did it. So it’s interesting when you go out on a date with a guy, a yuppie, a hipster, all those lovely terms for someone who moved to Brooklyn but wasn’t born and raised here and they give you a face. But in our culture, which is different from your culture, which yes is different from your culture, that’s ok. That’s acceptable. Our families are close.

LICHTMAN:

But this isn’t just about feeling connected, it’s also is about saving money–something Danielle became acutely aware of after her dad was seriously injured on the job when she was a kid.

D GOONAN:

We were on food stamps. We went from middle class, when you worked for the corporation I think you were upper-middle class, you had the Volvo you had the house. Then all of the sudden she’s driving to other neighborhoods to buy food with food stamps because she’s embarrassed. Because he got hurt. So I’m saving more than 20 percent of my paycheck and I spend another 500/month paying off education loans and I’m able to do that because I live at home.

LICHTMAN:

Not that there aren’t negotiations.

D GOONAN:

When I moved back it was different in the sense that technically I’m an adult. It’s my parents’ house. So you have to rewrite the rules.

B GOONAN:

Believe it or not I’m a little bit of a neat freak. My wife really is not a neat freak. And Danielle is a total disaster. So it goes down the line.

LICHTMAN:

How do Bill and Marion like having Danielle around?

M GOONAN:

I love having her around. She tends to… (voice) don’t butt in until I’m done. Yesterday I walked down the steps and we have a pool and we’re building a deck and I’m all excited. And I say, “I went to BJs and I bought those disinfectant wipes to wipe off the table.” And she went, “You went to BJs? You know they’re not good.”

D GOONAN:<br