Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone

by Settersten, Richard; Ray, Barbara E.

  Parents’ continued bitterness toward each other after a divorce can require young people to negotiate between them. Sometimes, these negotiations simply become too much work for the children, who withdraw altogether. Brian grew up in a small Iowa town where everyone knew everyone’s business, which made his parents’ divorce when he was in high school doubly traumatic for him. He not only dealt with the fallout at home from two angry and alienated parents, but he felt the eyes of the town on him wherever he went. Rumors, he said, were flying. His parents had never had a good relationship, and they had stayed together long after the love between them had died. “My parents had separate bedrooms for years,” he says. “I mean it would have almost been better if they had split earlier. My father would come home from work, eat dinner, and leave and go back to work until late at night just to avoid being in the house.”

  Today, Brian lives with his wife in Florida and works in construction. Although he remains on friendly terms with his parents, he sees them only once or twice a year. (They talk on the phone twice a week, though, particularly now that Brian’s wife is pregnant with the first grandchild.) His parents are still hostile toward each other, even fifteen years after their divorce. It makes for a difficult juggling act at times. Brian’s relationship with his mother has soured as a result of her continued bitterness toward his father. “She seems to try to find ways to try to manipulate situations to still try to play one against the other.” His father, he says, is more easygoing. “He couldn’t care less basically, but there is no way that my mother would even be in the same room as my father.” The situation is so tense that he and his wife decided not to invite either of them to their recent wedding. Brian says, “I didn’t want the hassle.”

  As parents divorce and remarry, family dynamics become even more complex and ambiguous. Stepparents and stepsiblings introduce new elements to the mix, and the legacy of hurt feelings and feelings of abandonment color future interactions, particularly as children like Sarah, Brian, and so many others who have been touched by divorce become adults in their own right. No one in these families quite knows what their relationships are supposed to look and feel like, or what kinds of responsibilities and expectations come with them. Unlike intact relationships, these relationships bring strain more often than they do support.

  Damaged Relationships

  Some of the young people we interviewed had tense or volatile relationships with their parents. In many of these cases, the parents abused drugs and alcohol, were physically or emotionally abusive, or had unstable mental health. Some even abandoned their children. When parents have a tempestuous or abusive relationship with each other, it also has a deep impact on their children.

  Theresa’s father dragged her down. “My father taught me the bad things in my life. He taught me about drugs, violence, and being a womanizer.” Her mother was not much help, either. “My mother called me a loser, a quitter, and a dropout.” Nicole was regularly whipped by her father. Denise says she purposefully got pregnant as a teenager to spite her mother, who then beat her, hoping to prompt a miscarriage. Denise later learned of her father’s cocaine problem, which fueled his abuse of her, and so many of the other problems in their fragile and explosive household.

  Tami ran wild in high school, hanging out with gangs and getting into drugs. And no wonder. Her father beat her and her mother, and cheated on her mother. Tami spent much of her young life seeking emotional support from her mom, and returning it as best she could, as the two of them hunkered down against the rages of her father. Tami would later become pregnant, have an abortion, and be arrested on a drug charge for which she performed six months of community service.

  After several tumultuous years, she seems to be straightening herself out and is now working full-time as a computer programmer and resuming work toward her bachelor’s degree. While she is devoted to her mother, she has only disdain for her father. “My father cheated on my mother,” she says. But not only that: Her father married the other woman in the Philippines and had a separate family with children while still being married to Tami’s mother. His second family now lives nearby. Her father is also very “violent,” “hardheaded,” and “controlling.” She and her mother have always lived in complete fear of him.

  Tami even had an order of protection against her father because he’d beaten her so badly that she’d ended up in the hospital. But that order didn’t stay. Her charismatic father, she says, convinced the police that she was the problem. The duplicitous life they led—happy on the outside, crying on the inside—was a heavy burden to carry all those years. Now that she’s an adult, he has less control over her. “He has no say over my life. He was never there as a father figure. He was never there financially. So basically, he has no power. Only that we’re scared of him.”

  Tami adores her mother. “She is my best friend and my role model because of everything she has to deal with.” She admires her mother’s strength not only in surviving everything her husband inflicted on her, but also for working her way up the corporate ladder. Her mother’s salary, not her father’s, has always paid the bills. And she recently filed for divorce. Tami hopes to emulate her mother—she wants to get better at managing her own life. She’s living at home partly to recover from her problems, partly to save money, and partly to protect her mother. She says, “We lean on each other if she’s feeling down or whatever. I’m there for her, to talk to her, to bring her confidence back up, and vice versa.” For Tami, the hardships she’s endured have in some ways left her mature beyond her years and, in other ways, still seeking the childhood she feels she missed.

  Some destructive relationships can, with years of work, be healed—and some are so bad they cannot. Once children reach adulthood, they may suddenly feel more able to liberate themselves from destructive relationships with parents. These young adults feel empowered by the fact that they need not stay and that they can now choose whether and how to engage their parents. For some young people, this may come with the painful resolution that they are better off without them than they are with them. But the scars remain.

  Fending for Themselves

  Some young adults have more than enduring scars from a difficult family dynamic: They do not have families at all. Approximately twenty thousand youths age out of foster care each year. Children enter foster care when the state intervenes in cases of abuse or neglect and removes them from untenable and dangerous family situations. The primary purpose of this separation is to protect these children from harm by removing them from their caregivers. In doing so, the state assumes the responsibilities associated with their parenting, including preparing them for independence. Although the state works to reunite children with their families, such reunions are not always possible. In the end, the government, acting as a parent, decides when these twenty thousand foster youth are ready to be on their own.

  Their fates, unfortunately, are often bleak. Network member Mark Courtney, a national expert in foster care and the child welfare system, finds that the older children in foster care are more likely to be living in the least family-like settings, such as group homes or institutions, than the overall foster care population. Youths in these settings are less likely to form the kind of lasting relationships with responsible adults that will help them move toward independence. In the early 2000s, nearly four in ten foster youths ages seventeen through twenty had no high school degree or GED. They more often suffered from mental health problems, were more often the perpetrators or victims of crime, and were more often homeless. Courtney found, for example, that 18 percent of these youths reported being homeless at least once since leaving care and turning twenty-one. Just over one-half of males and three in ten females had been incarcerated for at least one night between ages eighteen and twenty-one. Perhaps not surprisingly, given these sobering statistics, former foster children are much less likely to be employed than their peers, and are more likely to rely on public assistance. They earn, on average, too little to escape poverty.12 Although conc
erted efforts have been made to help these young adults carve a new path in life, the programs are severely strained and underfunded. Only about two-fifths of eligible foster youth receive independent living services.

  Good Relationships Gone Better or Bad

  Luckily, most young people have caring parents, and the closeness they feel seems to only get stronger with time. Young adults often talk spontaneously about the appreciation they gain for their parents, especially once they are married or have children of their own. They become more aware of all that their parents went through in raising them, and they begin to realize that their parents won’t always be around. Those who have experienced the death of a parent talk about the ways in which their relationship with the surviving parent intensifies after the other dies, and how the death of a parent has brought them closer to their siblings and their own children.

  Jennifer, a twenty-eight-year-old single woman who grew up in Iowa and now lives near Boston, sums up a common sentiment: “Initially, you just think of them as your parents. Then, in high school, they are kind of the last people that you want to be around. I guess I just didn’t really think about all they were doing for me. Since I’ve gotten older, and looked back on things, I have more respect for them, I appreciate them more now, and I feel like we can talk about it; they tell me their problems, whereas before that would never happen.”

  Yet even good relationships can go bad, and quickly. Parents can do everything “right” in terms of cultivating skills and opportunities and fostering great achievements in early adulthood—but not have great relationships with their kids. Luke’s story provides a stark example.

  Luke is twenty-five, a recent Ivy League graduate living in Chicago. His parents gave him both practical guidance and autonomy during his childhood in Denver. “Their philosophy was that there were some pretty fast-and-hard limits, but as long as I communicated with them, everything was okay. They basically let me run my life.” They were comfortable with this arrangement, he says, because “I was also good at running it.” His parents functioned more as “guidance counselors who had purse strings.”

  His parents were very supportive of his choices, and served as sounding boards to all of his decisions, whether big, like resigning from his position as captain of the cross-country team out of frustration with the coach, or small decisions, like which languages to take in high school. Luke’s parents helped him to enhance his long-term prospects, guiding him clearly along the path from high school to Ivy League. By all accounts they were a very close family.

  Until he came out. Luke long suspected he was gay, but not until senior year of high school did he finally apply the label to himself. Yet he would spend much of that year hiding his sexuality from his parents because they were “enormously conservative.” He worried, too, that coming out would jeopardize his plans for college if they decided to withdraw their financial support. He made the difficult choice of keeping his sexuality a secret from them throughout his undergraduate career.

  When he found out he had achieved a perfect score on the LSATs, Luke knew he finally had the independence he needed to live openly. As expected, offers poured in from all the top law schools. He also reached a point where he felt emotionally independent. The geographic independence helped, too: Chicago was a long way from Denver, and Luke was becoming more comfortable with his sexuality in Chicago’s gay community. He now realized his relationship with his parents was no longer honest.

  After he came out, Luke’s relationship with his parents was very strained, especially with his mother. She was “perturbed and active about it.” They didn’t talk for three months. “My mom refused to understand how her behavior was hurting me, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t communicating it; she refused to understand.” He and his father were on better terms, and it later came out that his father felt blindsided “by the fact that I didn’t want to talk anymore. He didn’t realize things were that wrong, and my mom wasn’t telling him about these conversations she was having with me.”

  Much to Luke’s surprise, his parents have started going to a support group for parents with gay or lesbian children. “They’re showing willingness to try and work better on it,” says Luke. However, he is still hesitant to reengage. While his parents are no longer actively trying to hurt him as they once did, Luke still has “a lot of internalized homophobia that is an inevitable result of growing up in the circumstances I did. Just hearing their voices stirs it all up.”

  Luke’s situation, along with that of so many of the young people we have profiled, reveals that relationships with parents are not simply carried forward into adulthood as a matter of course. They are being created and re-created as young people and their parents grow older. Healthy relationships involve give and take on both sides, and they rest on mutual love, or at least obligation. There are no scripts for how parents and their young adult children are “supposed” to relate to one another as the children become adults, especially in the blurry space between.

  Rules of Engagement

  Family relationships today are complex, not only in the wake of divorce and remarriage, but also because of the much greater diversity in how families look and feel. The connectedness and closeness between parents and kids did not suddenly emerge in the last decade; the “new” relationships between parents and children have been in the making for a long time.

  Strong relationships with parents are more necessary for a successful launch into adulthood today—at least in the United States. Most, if not all, of the responsibility for raising children rests in the hands of parents. The presence of strong family guidance and support is ultimately the factor that sharply separates those who swim from those who tread or sink in the transition to adulthood. Closeness helps, but closeness alone will not get young people through college and into better-paying and more meaningful jobs or careers.

  The longer and more complicated passage to adulthood has brought new ambiguities for relationships between parents and children. Parents are uncertain what to do when the guidebooks end at age eighteen. There are no norms for “big” kids who are adults according to old standards, but who have yet to achieve the major milestones of adulthood. Relationships are being crafted as they go.

  Parents cannot go on autopilot and apply the old rules—“when I was a kid …” or “my parents would never have …” These rules of engagement no longer apply. What’s more, a hands-off or hard-knocks approach to parenting can be detrimental to a child’s long-term future. This is where our story of diverging destinies continues. These types of strategies are more often the default attitudes of working- and lower-class families, and they exacerbate the vulnerabilities of young adults.

  We discovered, expectedly, a tone of resentment in our interviews with the young people who are struggling to make it with minimal or no family support, especially when they can see that their more privileged counterparts are getting a lot more help and are experiencing these years so differently. The things these disadvantaged youth are able to achieve are viewed, in contrast to their better-positioned peers, as hard-won badges of honor. They believe that while their peers with greater privileges have had everything handed to them, they instead have had to make their way without any underpinnings to protect them.

  And they’re right. So much of the media attention and public discussion of twenty-somethings is focused on the well-positioned young people who are sure to swim. As a society, we pay too little attention to the fates of young people whose parents are unable or unwilling to provide the guidance and support that they so desperately need.

  7

  iDecide: Voting and Volunteering in a Digital World

  “Riding down the street to cover the election watch party … I heard screaming and shouts coming from cars. People were hanging out of their cars and ‘change’ was chanted. I knew at that very moment: Barack Obama won the election,” wrote de Nishia on the Rock the Vote blog. She was one of the thousands who descended on Chicago’s Grant Park to catch the wave of the
historic moment. “It is this generation,” says Heather Smith, the executive director of Rock the Vote, “that is making their mark on politics and shaping our future.”

  Early on in the year 2008, Time magazine deemed it “the year of the youth vote.” While in years past, the youth vote had always disappointed, things were starting to look different. During the 1990s, only about four in ten young people under age thirty were turning out for elections, far below the rates of older voters. Many in the country were hoping the momentum among young people that had been building ever so slowly since 2004 would turn into a surge of new voters drawn to Barack Obama. Without that surge, the problem of voter turnout, so important to a truly robust democracy, was in danger of deepening.

  Of this we can be sure: Over the last four decades, young adults have retreated from “civic engagement” of every kind, whether reading news papers, attending club meetings, joining formal groups, working on community projects, voting, joining unions, or joining religious groups.1 For some of these indicators, the drop has been very steep. The single exception is a small increase in volunteering.2

  Civic life is part and parcel of adulthood. The very acts of being civic-minded—voting, volunteering, and taking part in community—are the responsibilities of adults in a society. Children are tutored in these responsibilities at school and at home, and they are given opportunities to practice these tasks at every turn, from running for school council to debating to raising money for the less fortunate. The responsibilities of caring for and tending to communities and neighborhoods (and the country as a whole) are as important as tending to and caring for families as adults. We care deeply about what young people can do for civic life because the fate of democracy rests on it.