Hope for the Future
The traditional indicators of involvement in politics and community life among young adults do show alarming declines. But our findings reveal that this generation is delaying, not rejecting, those commitments. We suspect that as young people settle into the roles and responsibilities of adulthood, they will be recruited into civic action and will at the same time plant a stronger stake in politics and government.
Few periods of life embody as much possibility for civic engagement, with as much potential payoff, as the early-adult years—especially in light of the longer passage to adulthood today. While increasing the engagement of young people helps secure the future of our democracy, civic engagement fosters the skills and capacities of young adults. For the swimmers, it can be instrumental in helping them find themselves as they begin to carve out their identities as adults. They can wrestle with social issues, explore and express their personal values and beliefs, have growth experiences, and find like-minded others, to name but a few benefits.
But civic engagement holds far greater possibilities for those who are treading and even sinking. For these at-risk youth, civic engagement can provide an important gateway to building skills, experiences, and resources that they would otherwise not have. It gives them the opportunity to learn important lessons about being a leader, working with teams, and effecting change, and allows them to see firsthand the outcomes of social action. And it also increases these young peoples’ prospects by building up their résumés and expanding their social networks. The key to tapping into this potential is creating solid opportunities that ring true to young people. Obama and his team took a first step, but there is a long way to go.
The gulf in civic participation between those who go to college and those who do not is alarming. Ethnic minorities and new immigrants, as well as young people from working-class backgrounds, are less likely to complete high school or attend college. As such, it is important that opportunities for civic involvement be created at work, at church, in neighborhoods, and in other places so that these groups might be better incorporated into the body politic. Providing deep and meaningful civic experiences for teens before college can also lead to higher grades and a more involved school career, as was the case with Jacquie. This might just be the ticket to getting more disadvantaged youth into and through college. In the broader perspective, failing to do this is a disservice—not only to our democratic ideals, but to the future of the nation as well.
In the wake of the recent presidential election, many Americans seemed to have a renewed sense of hope in the government and in the political process. That optimism has faded with the financial crisis and deep recession. Politicians and others in the public sphere must continue to engage with young adults in ways that are meaningful to them.
The growing disconnection of young adults from conventional politics signals a crisis. What seemed like a turnaround in the last major election was, indeed, a change in a positive direction, but at levels that were neither high nor necessarily permanent. It was also carried by young adults in college or with college degrees.
The traditional modes of political engagement matter for the survival of democracy, especially voting. But emergent modes of engagement matter, too, especially digital media, for they will become mainstream conventions in the years to come. Many young people are actively engaged—just not in ways older people might immediately recognize. Youth today are tuned in to new forms of social networking and political action. As Jacquie says, it’s important for her elders to realize that her generation is not uninvolved, just involved differently. This potential must be actively nurtured if Sherri and her many detached peers are to become involved in their society and have a say in its future. No less than our democracy is at stake.
8
Converging Destinies: Prescriptions for Change
Who Is Responsible for the Welfare of Young People?
The fates of many young people, not just in the United States but also around the world, ultimately hang on the question of who is responsible for their well-being: young people themselves, their families, marketplaces, or governments?
A globalized economy and the increasingly privatized and deregulated marketplace have placed greater responsibility on families for launching young adults—just as the process of becoming an adult has grown longer and more complicated. More than at any time in recent history, parents are being called on to provide assistance to their young adult children. Yet the ability of families to do so varies greatly based on the resources they have or can access through their formal or informal connections to other people, organizations, and social settings.
The different resources of families lock young people’s diverging destinies into place. Those from middle-class and elite families receive significant investments of money, time, and other kinds of support from their parents, which help them make it through their twenties. The differences in financial outlays by household income are massive. Parents whose earnings place them in the top 25 percent of earners nationwide gave their adult children (ages twenty-one through twenty-four in 2007) an average of $17,615 in 2006, while parents in the bottom 25 percent were able to give only about $4,500.1 For middle- and upper-class youths, these investments build upon the prior two decades in which their parents worked to cultivate their skills and capital to increase the likelihood that they would do well in adulthood. The foundations for their less privileged peers are shakier and often seriously cracked. Of course, it has always been true that some youths do well and others do not, regardless of resources. Having resources is no guarantee of success, just as the absence of resources does not mean that a young person is predestined to fail. But the presence of resources surely increases the likelihood of positive outcomes in early adulthood. And it buffers poor judgments and mistakes, which are more perilous today as the safety nets on which post–World War II generations could rely—pensions and health insurance, steady work with benefits, and company loyalty, to name a few—are fraying.
Middle-class families have been hit hard as they try to piece together the support that young adult children need. Many families that once seemed strongly positioned to help their children are now experiencing new vulnerabilities amid the Great Recession that began in 2008. As the middle class shrinks and family incomes vacillate from year to year in an uncertain economy, families cannot afford to offer the same set of resources to their children.2 Families on the low end of the middle-income bracket seem particularly vulnerable—they have some, but not ample, resources, and their incomes are just enough to render them ineligible for government support. Yet even for solidly middle-class families, all of this support comes with long-term costs, as decisions are set against second mortgages and compromised retirement funds.
Working-class families can offer even less, as their incomes have stagnated since the 1970s and secure jobs have all but disappeared. In addition to having more limited resources, or perhaps because of it, working-class parents more often believe in early independence for their children, leaving them on their own at a time when many of their peers are benefiting from the extended support of their parents. For those young people whose family lives are more fragile or whose families simply cannot afford to help them, the independence comes sometimes even earlier. Young people who have been in the foster care or the juvenile justice system are abruptly cut off from support when they reach the legal age of adulthood, eighteen or in some cases twenty-one. Not only must they fend entirely for themselves, but it is this group of vulnerable youth who is often least equipped to manage.
Although families shoulder the brunt of responsibility in determining how young people in the United States fare as they make their way into adulthood, governments are also powerful forces in this process. Nations provide dramatically different packages of resources to young people. The amount and type of government support depends on the degree to which young people are seen to be at risk, and on the assumptions that governments make about who is res
ponsible for managing those risks and swallowing the costs. Some governments offer strong scaffolding to young people as they make their way through educational institutions and job markets or form families.3 Others, like the United States, offer very weak scaffolding for young people, placing a high premium on self-reliance and private solutions to personal troubles. The United States takes a “sink or swim” philosophy, leaving it up to individuals and their families to navigate markets for education, jobs, housing, and partners on their own. This results in highly competitive high-wire acts. During these years, young people make decisions and take actions that have significant cumulative effects over the many decades of life ahead. Good decisions are critical to a successful adulthood, and bad ones can be disastrous. As a result, it is not surprising that a higher proportion of young people in the United States seem to “tread water” or “sink” relative to those in other countries.4
The challenges of the transition to adulthood extend well beyond the most vulnerable groups, beyond what might be perceived as small segments of the population. These challenges are felt acutely through the ranks of the middle class. The young person who does not need significant help in entering adulthood seems the exception today. Yet there remains a gaping mismatch between the realities of contemporary life and the assumption guiding laws and policies that, at age eighteen or twenty-one, individuals have crossed the threshold of adulthood where “dependence” magically ends and “independence” magically begins. In reality, few young people today, even those closing out their twenties, would be considered “adult” based on traditional markers such as living on one’s own, being finished with school or employed full-time, being married, or having children. And few young people today actually feel like full-fledged adults. Even in their late twenties and early thirties, most say they feel adult in some ways but not yet in others.5 The boundary between adolescence and adulthood has become very blurry in terms of both behavior and state of mind.
One wonders whether a more relevant milestone in today’s world is not the achievement of independence, which has long been the central defining characteristic of adulthood, but instead the achievement of strong ties to others—what we might instead call interdependence. To compensate for new uncertainties and the weak scaffolding provided by some families and governments, an effective strategy for young people making their way into adulthood is to build wider and stronger webs of relationships with others. A strong social network of personal and professional contacts can foster development and provide a set of supports that can be activated as needed. Interdependence is not about completely relying on others for one’s own welfare, but is instead about knowing how to make and maintain positive, healthy, reciprocal relationships that offer a safety net for oneself and contribute to the safety nets of others.
Meaningful relationships with others have significant effects on a wide array of young adult outcomes—bolstering school achievement, success in jobs, emotional maturity, and satisfaction with life, and keeping problem behaviors such as substance or alcohol abuse in check. On a more superficial level, interdependence can also affect outcomes via wide networks of loosely connected acquaintances who provide access to precious opportunities and resources.
In the United States, the costs for managing the extended transition to adulthood are, to a great degree, private ones, carried by whatever social connections or resources young people and their parents have or can create. Yet the transition takes place within multiple institutional contexts, such as higher education, housing markets, the workplace, and communities. How these institutions interact with, guide, and shape the transition to adulthood is based on old models of life that are often out of sync with our lives today. The investments that society makes in the institutions are important. We must rethink many of these core institutions—including marriage and family, schools and work organizations, health insurance, leisure, retirement—and the policies and practices surrounding them.
We offer several suggestions for new directions. We begin with suggestions for parents, given that most of the responsibility for young adults lies with them—a fact that is unlikely to change. We believe, however, that the marketplace and government should play larger roles in this transition period, easing some of the disparities created by the growing inequalities in families’ resources. We therefore offer some fledgling ideas and point to some solid programs that are creating opportunities for those from the disappearing middle class, including clearer routes into school, work, and healthy families.
Parents, Be Present …
Parents are not “at fault” for creating a longer and more complex transition to adulthood for their children. As we have seen, many social and economic forces are bigger culprits. But it is parents who play a major role in determining how children are positioned when they reach adulthood, what happens to them as they make their way, and how they fare when all is said and done. Strong, healthy relationships between parents and young adults are one of the most significant factors in determining whether young people succeed in early adulthood. Feeling close to parents is an important part of this.
Even more critical is having the active guidance and support of parents. Young adults need to make their own decisions, but they require guidance now more than ever. Throughout the transition to adulthood, parents should help their children sort out options, contemplate pros and cons, unearth opportunities, and understand the expectations of the adult world. This makes a huge difference, and it doesn’t require much in terms of resources. The support of adults other than parents is also crucial, especially for young people who come from fragile families or from families where parents don’t have the necessary skills or knowledge.
For this reason, being hands-off and even allowing children to learn by the school of hard knocks when they reach early adulthood is often counterproductive to helping them get ahead. Without the guidance of parents, young people can make serious mistakes that could have been avoided and cannot be easily undone. Hands-off parenting has cumulative consequences in that children, after being left to their own devices for so long, reach adulthood with far fewer skills and fewer well-formed ideas about the future than those whose parents have been hands-on. Intervening in a young person’s life to avoid harmful outcomes can only be a good thing. True, it is important for young people to be responsible for their decisions and to learn from their mistakes. But it is also unnecessary to let young adult children make mistakes that are certain to be damaging by not intervening.
All parents and children would benefit from one thing: clear, regular communication. The unparalleled closeness between today’s parents and children is the very thing that can open new kinds of conversation as children make their way into adulthood. Whether children are heading off to college, finding first apartments and jobs, or staying at home, both parents and children should talk about their expectations during this time of change.
Consider communication itself: How often do you each want to communicate, and through what medium? What topics are off limits? Similarly, it would be helpful for parents and children to talk about expectations about visits and dropping in, any rules parents have for staying at home (think: sleeping arrangements with boyfriends or girlfriends), and any expectations children have about how parents will interact with their friends, supervisors from work, or college faculty and administrators. And when teens head off to college, it is advisable for their parents to talk with them about how often they’ll communicate about their grades and other needs or difficulties. (Under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, administrators and faculty can communicate very little information to parents directly about their student.) This is also a critical moment for open conversation about sensitive topics, such as alcohol and drugs, dating, sexual health, and money.
Regardless of whether young people are bound for college, they need to understand that failure happens, and that at some point it will happen to them. Many parents today have fostered a sense of invincibility in their childr
en. Young people often do not understand how much time and effort they must invest if they are to get the grades they need or the jobs they want. This lack of understanding was very apparent in our chapter on education. The mentality of young people today is often that they are consumers of higher education, buying their degrees to ensure a certain kind of future. Many even feel entitled to degrees in exchange for expensive tuition. The growing corporate climates of universities also exacerbate the student-as-consumer mentality.
Many members of this generation have been reared to believe that their potential is limitless. If young people are to be successful, they should have plans for education and work that are detailed and realistic. Not everyone can be at the top. High ambitions cannot be met if clear plans and solid skills are absent. Parents must help their children to honestly assess the skills they have, what they need to do to achieve their goals, and whether those goals are realistic.
It is not just parents who must provide better and more realistic guidance to young adults. So must the institutions that serve young people. Consider grade inflation. In high schools and colleges, grade distributions are heavily weighted toward the upper end. Receiving a C is interpreted as a kiss of death for students, and teachers and professors are often afraid to give them, particularly since they know that doing so might lead to uncomfortable confrontations. But the meaning of C is “average,” and most students are, by definition, average. As parents and teachers, we’re not being frank with our children and students about their performance and their potential, and what they need to accomplish if they are to get on in the world.
Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone Page 23