Because people in their 20s are taking longer to grow up, some want to make a new stage of development called "emerging adulthood."

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he passage into adulthood has traditionally connoted a few tangible benchmarks: Leaving home, achieving financial independence, marrying, and having kids. But in recent decades, those steps have been slower in coming for many 20-somethings, inspiring an array of new catchphrases like "failure to launch" and "boomerang kids." Now, as described in a New York Times Magazine feature, some psychologists are saying that this lengthening period of development should be formally designated as "emerging adulthood." Has U.S. society changed so much in a generation that we need a new growth stage for ages 18 to 29?

There's something to the idea: Making "emerging adulthood" into a formal developmental phase raises some problems, says Molly Fischer in The New York Observer, not least because this phenomenon is largely class-based. "But speaking as an 'emerging adult,'" The Times is right that "we and our peers are not actual grownups, or if we are, we have wildly overestimated what being a grownup feels like."
"Times Magazine tries to figure out the twenty-somethings"

The Times just doesn't get youth culture: That's hogwash, says Judy Berman in Flavorwire. The portrait of "emerging adulthood" slackers painted by writer Robin Marantz Henig is "both unfamiliar and offensive" to 20-somethings like me who "pay our own bills." If these "emerging" adults are moving back home, maybe it's because the Baby Boomers' "greed destroyed the economy."
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Is anyone a grownup anymore? "The rules have changed" for 20-somethings, says Jessica Pressler in New York Magazine. But Henig misses the bigger issue: "Does anyone ever 'grow up' anymore?" Take the Baby Boomers: Yes, they married younger, got jobs, and had kids. But then "didn't a fairly gigantic number of them freak out and rid themselves of the 'trappings of adulthood' they'd acquired early in life"? Perhaps "we're all emerging adults now."
"The Times asks: When are you going to grow up?"