who are said to be averse to growing up. These descriptors are readily taken up in the media where there is talk about the rise of “adultescents,” “kidults,” and “twixters” in the U.S. and Australia, “boomerang kids” in Canada, Nesthocker in Germany, mammone in Italy, and KIPPERS (Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings) in the U.K. (Time 2005a; Time 2005b).8
Social scientists have evolved their own concepts to accommodate essentially the same view. Indeed, media attention to young people's deferral or rejection of adulthood can draw on expert advice with a long history. Although in reality a number of approaches differ in nuance, for analytic clarity I subsume these under the delayed adulthood thesis. As intimated above, twentieth-century North American notions of adolescence as a period of “structured irresponsibility” (Parsons 1942a) and as “identity crisis” (Erikson 1950) can be considered paradigmatic of Western culture's perceptions and treatment of adolescents up to the present. Taking the “storm and stress” view as a given, psychoanalyst Peter Blos (1941) coined the term “post-adolescence.” It designates a stage of life inhabited by individuals who have outgrown adolescence, but have not yet reached adulthood. These are individuals who, according to Keniston (1970: 634), “far from seeking the adult prerogative of their parents…vehemently demand a virtually indefinite prolongation of their nonadult state.” Erikson's (1968) “prolonged adolescence” neatly encapsulates this idea—a vision that continues to have currency today. What for marketers and journalists are twixters, adultescents, and kidults, for social scientists are lives led in a manner that is analogous with a particular image of adolescence: a time of irresponsibility where few decisions have to be made, and the capacity to reconcile “work and love” has not yet been completely attained. Consequently, contemporary trends are then equated with a prolonged transition to and delayed entry into full adulthood (e.g., Côté 2000; Furstenberg et al. 2003, 2004; Arnett 2004; Settersten et al. 2005; Schwartz et al. 2005).
Sociologist Frank Furedi (2003: 5) is unequivocal in his condemnation of what he perceives to be an “infantilisation of contemporary society.” Taking umbrage at adults' alleged “present-day obsession with childish things”—gadgetry of all kinds, including soft toys and children's books—he asserts: “Hesitations about embracing adulthood reflect a diminished aspiration for independence, commitment and experimentation.” His agreement with social psychologist Stephen Richardson, who holds that “we do not reach maturity until the age of 35” (quoted in Furedi 2003: 5), also speaks volumes about social scientists' perspective on adolescence as a time of immaturity, and adulthood as the culmination of a kind of maturity that Peter Berger ( 1966: 69) described as that “state of mind that has settled down, come to terms with the status quo, given up the wilder dreams of adventure and fulfillment.” This kind of view, of which Furedi's essay is but one articulation, illustrates how late-nineteenth-century ideas about young people (and prevailing normative notions of masculinity and adulthood) are still deployed in social-scientific analyses of present trends. And it does so with particular eloquence because its advocates, in all their earnestness, appear entirely oblivious of this very fact. Hans Peter Duerr's (1985: 126) assertion that one of the tasks of the scientist is to “mount a defence against that which is strange,” has some resonance here, if only as a possible unconscious motivation rather than full intention.
In fact, with this (unacknowledged but implied) model of adolescence in mind, proponents of the delayed adulthood thesis at times assert with some certainty when adolescence now ends and adulthood begins. Thus the U.S. National Academy of Sciences pegs the end of adolescence at 30 years of age (Danesi 2003: 104–5). The issue becomes positively confusing when, in a programmatic statement on professional confidentiality, members of the U.S. Society for Adolescent Medicine state, “[a]dolescents who are age 18 or older are adults” (Ford et al. 2004: 164). There is, in other words, no social-scientific consensus concerning the end of one period of life and the beginning of the next. There is agreement, however, that today young people take longer to reach full adulthood than was previously the case. Furstenberg (2000: 898) sums up the prevailing accord: “[T]he transition to adulthood extend[s] well into the third decade of life and is not completed by a substantial fraction of young people until their 30s.”
To accommodate the demographic changes that lie at the root of the allegedly protracted and delayed entry into adulthood in affluent societies, two conceptions of North American provenance have gained particular currency: Jeffrey J. Arnett's “emerging adulthood,” and “early adulthood,” a concept marshaled by a MacArthur Foundation research group into transitions to adulthood headed by Frank F. Furstenberg. Both perspectives are based on the belief that a new life stage separates adolescence from adulthood. Emerging adulthood pertains to individuals between 18 and approximately 25 years of age who, “[h]aving left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood,” inhabit an in-between stage (Arnett 2000a: 469). Early adulthood describes a phase from the late teens to the late twenties or early thirties when “young people have not yet become fully adult because they are not ready or able to perform the full range of adult roles” (Furstenberg et al. 2003: i). According to Arnett (2000a: 471), terms such as “late adolescence,” “young adulthood,” and by implication “early adulthood,” should be avoided because emerging adults “do not see themselves as adolescents, but many of them also do not see themselves entirely as adults.” The main difference between these approaches, then, is one of nomenclature. In fact, the research agendas are eminently compatible both in terms of their respective subject areas and conclusions. They are erudite elaborations of the notion that the transition to adulthood is increasingly extended, and that thus entry into full adulthood occurs later than was previously the case—that the twixters, the kidults, and adultescents are on the rise.
Taken in sum, Arnett and Furstenberg et al.'s research output makes important contributions to the study of young people's experiences and the shifting normative frame in which they unfold. Be it the chronicling of social transformations in the United States since the Second World War; be it the subjective perceptions of the transition to adulthood (Arnett 1997) and the perceptions and attitudes of young people concerning their futures (Arnett 2000b); be it North Americans' views about the timing of life events that for them connote the transition to adulthood (Furstenberg et al. 2003; 2004): the combined findings are significant contributions to our understanding of subjective views and manifestations of social changes. But the validity and utility of data hinge ultimately on how they contribute to concept building, and how new concepts are put to use. This is particularly important when we attempt to describe and understand the experiences of young people, not least because policies informed by this kind of research have a very real and direct impact on young people. For this reason alone the prevailing view needs to be expanded. A first step is to point out some inherent misconceptions, not least because they underpin much of the work done in the area of “youth transitions.”
Epistemological Fallacy I: The Subjectivization of Everything
The aforementioned researchers have made invaluable contributions to our understanding of young people's perceptions of adolescence and the transition to adulthood, and perhaps none more so than Arnett. However, something is amiss in his interpretation of the data. Arnett connects what is considered a highly individualized Western culture directly to the alleged personalization of life stages. To this end the following statement may be considered programmatic not only for Arnett's approach, but for much of the oeuvre: “The more individualistic a culture becomes, the more the transition to adulthood is individually rather than socially defined. It takes place subjectively, individually, internally, in an individual's sense of having reached a state of self-sufficiency, emotional self-reliance, and behavioral self-control” (Arnett and Taber 1994: 533, original emphasis). This assertion fits hand in glove with Côté's (2000: 31 ) claim, “adulthood is now more a psychological state than a social status.” In fact, Côté's approach to the changing nature of adulthood is instructive here, and it is worth addressing, not least because of his recent collaboration with Arnett (Schwartz et al. 2005)—a quasi-natural affiliation considering their respective approaches. Central to Côté's view on identity formation in emerging adulthood
