Nearly 30 years ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his team of co-authors in Habits of the Heart (1985) described the American parenting ideal as the production of independent children who “leave home,” both figuratively and literally. To never leave home, they wrote, violated the cardinal American virtue of self-reliance, contradicting self-understandings that individuals should “earn everything we get, accept no handouts or gifts, and free ourselves from our families of origin.” The essence of parenting was preparing children for just such a separation, reflecting the American belief that a meaningful life could be had only by breaking free from family and giving birth, in a sense, to oneself. “However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.” Successful launching was the quest, and the empty nest, even though it required adjustment, the reward. If these were the habits of the parenting heart in the 1980s, American parents clearly have had a change of heart.Consider these recent findings from the Culture of American Families Survey, conducted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Two-thirds of American parents of school-age children now say they would “willingly support a 25-year-old child financially” if needed. Two-thirds say they would encourage a 25-year-old to move back home if he or she had difficulty affording housing. Parents still hope, of course, that their adult children will attain financial independence, but this aspiration is no stronger than the hope that children will retain “close ties with parents and family”—both are considered “essential” by about half of American parents. The quest for long-term connection with children has taken central stage. Parenting is still about formation, but its overriding concern has pivoted from formation to connection. One has only to consider parents’ responses to the statement “I hope to be best friends with my children when they are grown” to know something new is happening at home. Almost three-quarters of today’s parents of school-age children (72 percent) agree that they eventually want to be their children’s best friends; only 17 percent disagree. The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.
Ambiguous Adulthood
With this as their goal, it is no wonder American parents increasingly welcome twenty-something “boomerang children” back into “accordion families.” Compared to a generation ago, increasing numbers of adults in their twenties and thirties regularly call home to their parents, and regularly call their parents’ households “home.” American parents, meanwhile, more than parents in some nations, have felt the need to justify welcoming adult children back—as helping to finance a child’s schooling or the purchase of a separate residence, for example. But the practice has become so commonplace that justifying narratives are less and less necessary; the stigma attached to living with Mom and Dad is waning. Sociologist Katherine Newman suggests in The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition (2012) that the very notions of “adulthood” and “independence” are increasingly ambiguous. Criteria such as residential independence, the creation of a new family, and economic autonomy have given way to something more elusive: You become an adult when you feel like one. It is the self-perception of autonomy and freedom that matters. Adulthood has become a subjective category.
Or the criteria may simply have changed, with young adults substituting personal autonomy (in their purchases, leisure pursuits, and lifestyles) and popular cultural knowledge (of the sort derived from exposure to popular media) for traditional signs of adulthood. Consider these findings from the Culture of American Families Survey. The typical older teen (16–19) has both a cell phone and a social networking account. She texts and talks with friends on her cell phone multiple times per day. She spends an hour or two daily on the Internet and streams videos several times a week. And she gets together with friends with no adult supervision about once a week. (It is important to note here that the Culture of American Families Survey is a nationally representative study of parents of school-age children. So these findings present parents’ understandings of what their children are doing.) What is more, the social backdrop for her semi-autonomous and plugged-in world often includes parents who themselves have positive attitudes toward the new technologies or, if not, at least accept them as the wave of the future, a wave their child cannot miss. So beyond the subjective feelings of adulthood, older teenagers’ very real freedom in consumption and leisure choices, their media connections with the world beyond the home, and the cultural knowledge that accumulates from these activities and links reinforce their perceptions that they deserve to be treated as adults.
Something unacknowledged in their rush to “adulthood” is not only their lack of economic independence but also their incompetence in practical matters. Older teens—legally “adults”—may mock their parents’ ignorance of the latest web trends or media celebrities, but they are often stumped by things their parents, at the same age, would have considered basic: changing a tire, replacing a button, ironing clothes, applying for a job, and the like. A recent analysis of such practical torpor by psychologists Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen goes so far as to suggest that 25 years of age is the new 15. In Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old (2009), they note, “We’ve worked with macho teenage boys—high school seniors who were more than able to take their licks on an athletic field or jousting with peers—who were reduced to near paralysis when told to go to a shopping center on their own and approach store managers about possible job opportunities. So far removed and so beyond them did the adult world seem that these teens felt unable to enter it alone, even in the most rudimentary ways.” Other researchers have pointed to the incomplete development of the adolescent brain as the source of adolescent troubles, but the Allens instead highlight the insular nature of the adolescent world. Adolescents, they contend, grow up in a peer-dominated bubble, cut off from adult contacts, adult roles, and the adult world in general (other than their parents). This leaves little beyond their gadgets, studies, and peer-centered activities to serve as the basis for a broader sense of life’s meaning and purpose. What is more, the values absorbed from their media-defined world contrast markedly, the authors contend, with the traits valued by their parents and the adult world in general.
Overall, the Allens suggest, this adolescent bubble makes it harder for young people to engage in more meaningful pursuits or to make more significant contributions, leaving them to study, text, and tweet into the wee hours of the night. For their part, young adults defer plans for creating their own families, tangle fitfully with a challenging labor market, and rely on their parents’ financial and practical support until well into their twenties, if not beyond. Young adults from economically secure families sometimes opt for extended periods of self-discovery and vocational experimentation, relying on parents as security blankets for hard times. The more demanding route of competitive higher education, an ambitious career track, and the shouldering of vocational and family responsibilities is seen as something that can wait. But this leisurely stroll toward “leaving home” doesn’t preclude the embrace of an adult identity, even if it is framed in the language of “emerging adults” or “young adults.”
With this as their goal, it is no wonder American parents increasingly welcome twenty-something “boomerang children” back into “accordion families.” Compared to a generation ago, increasing numbers of adults in their twenties and thirties regularly call home to their parents, and regularly call their parents’ households “home.” American parents, meanwhile, more than parents in some nations, have felt the need to justify welcoming adult children back—as helping to finance a child’s schooling or the purchase of a separate residence, for example. But the practice has become so commonplace that justifying narratives are less and less necessary; the stigma attached to living with Mom and Dad is waning. Sociologist Katherine Newman suggests in The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition (2012) that the very notions of “adulthood” and “independence” are increasingly ambiguous. Criteria such as residential independence, the creation of a new family, and economic autonomy have given way to something more elusive: You become an adult when you feel like one. It is the self-perception of autonomy and freedom that matters. Adulthood has become a subjective category.
Or the criteria may simply have changed, with young adults substituting personal autonomy (in their purchases, leisure pursuits, and lifestyles) and popular cultural knowledge (of the sort derived from exposure to popular media) for traditional signs of adulthood. Consider these findings from the Culture of American Families Survey. The typical older teen (16–19) has both a cell phone and a social networking account. She texts and talks with friends on her cell phone multiple times per day. She spends an hour or two daily on the Internet and streams videos several times a week. And she gets together with friends with no adult supervision about once a week. (It is important to note here that the Culture of American Families Survey is a nationally representative study of parents of school-age children. So these findings present parents’ understandings of what their children are doing.) What is more, the social backdrop for her semi-autonomous and plugged-in world often includes parents who themselves have positive attitudes toward the new technologies or, if not, at least accept them as the wave of the future, a wave their child cannot miss. So beyond the subjective feelings of adulthood, older teenagers’ very real freedom in consumption and leisure choices, their media connections with the world beyond the home, and the cultural knowledge that accumulates from these activities and links reinforce their perceptions that they deserve to be treated as adults.
Something unacknowledged in their rush to “adulthood” is not only their lack of economic independence but also their incompetence in practical matters. Older teens—legally “adults”—may mock their parents’ ignorance of the latest web trends or media celebrities, but they are often stumped by things their parents, at the same age, would have considered basic: changing a tire, replacing a button, ironing clothes, applying for a job, and the like. A recent analysis of such practical torpor by psychologists Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen goes so far as to suggest that 25 years of age is the new 15. In Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old (2009), they note, “We’ve worked with macho teenage boys—high school seniors who were more than able to take their licks on an athletic field or jousting with peers—who were reduced to near paralysis when told to go to a shopping center on their own and approach store managers about possible job opportunities. So far removed and so beyond them did the adult world seem that these teens felt unable to enter it alone, even in the most rudimentary ways.” Other researchers have pointed to the incomplete development of the adolescent brain as the source of adolescent troubles, but the Allens instead highlight the insular nature of the adolescent world. Adolescents, they contend, grow up in a peer-dominated bubble, cut off from adult contacts, adult roles, and the adult world in general (other than their parents). This leaves little beyond their gadgets, studies, and peer-centered activities to serve as the basis for a broader sense of life’s meaning and purpose. What is more, the values absorbed from their media-defined world contrast markedly, the authors contend, with the traits valued by their parents and the adult world in general.
Overall, the Allens suggest, this adolescent bubble makes it harder for young people to engage in more meaningful pursuits or to make more significant contributions, leaving them to study, text, and tweet into the wee hours of the night. For their part, young adults defer plans for creating their own families, tangle fitfully with a challenging labor market, and rely on their parents’ financial and practical support until well into their twenties, if not beyond. Young adults from economically secure families sometimes opt for extended periods of self-discovery and vocational experimentation, relying on parents as security blankets for hard times. The more demanding route of competitive higher education, an ambitious career track, and the shouldering of vocational and family responsibilities is seen as something that can wait. But this leisurely stroll toward “leaving home” doesn’t preclude the embrace of an adult identity, even if it is framed in the language of “emerging adults” or “young adults.”
by Carl Desportes Bowman, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Hedgehog Review
