The 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."
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