Today's New York Times has an article entitled "Economy Is Forcing Young Adults Back Home in Big Numbers, Survey Finds." The article focuses primarily on a new study by the Pew Research Center, including the finding that, "Ten percent of adults younger than 35... moved back in with their parents because of the recession." Here's a link to the original Pew report.

Several articles have recently appeared on the question of what age (or ages) should delineate the onset of adulthood for purposes of rights and responsibilities under the law. The outlets in which these articles have appeared include the New York Times, the American Psychologist, and the policy wonkish Governing magazine.

The emergence of these articles coincides with a currently pending U.S. Supreme Court case on whether it is constitutional to impose a life sentence for a crime other than murder that was committed as a juvenile. Beyond court cases, however, the issue of legal cut-off ages is fascinating and challenging in its own right. According to the Times article:

At the heart of the argument lies a vexing question: When should a person be treated as an adult?

The answer, generally, is 18 — the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions. But there are countless deviations from this benchmark, both around the world (the bar mitzvah, for instance), and within the United States.

For drinking, driving, fighting in the military, compulsory schooling, watching an R-rated movie, consenting to sex, getting married, having an abortion or even being responsible for your own finances, the dawn of adulthood in America is all over the place.

Among the factors complicating this debate is that different cognitive and behavioral abilities -- corresponding to different policy objectives -- may, on average, crystallize at different ages. The aforementioned American Psychologist article by Laurence Steinberg and colleagues contends, for example, that factual, logical abilities solidify earlier than impulse-control mechanisms.

One approach to addressing these challenges is to phase in legal rights gradually or contingent on parental approval. Examples include "graduated" driving privileges and the mimimum ages at which young people can marry.

I invite readers who have opinions on this topic to add comments to this posting!

The New York Times, in its "Room for Debate" forum, recently featured the topic, "The 40-Something Dependent Child." In the first part, the Times solicited the opinions of scholars and authors as to why many young people are taking longer than in past generations to establish their own financial independence. In the second part, Times readers share their views.

Business Week magazine's October 19 issue featured a cover story entitled "The Lost Generation." As the article notes:

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts, to college grads, to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18%, from 13% a year ago.

Further, as detailed in the article, negative consequences of these employment problems include depressed lifetime earnings, low worker morale, and stress and mental health problems.

An accompanying article evaluates the merits of Germany's apprenticeship system for youth who pursue early job training as opposed to higher education and professional careers. One young man featured in the article "g[ave] up full-time schooling at age 15" for a training program that involved "alternating two weeks of on-the-job training with one week of classes at a vocational school." In addition to heating, plumbing, and air-conditioning, other tracks "rang[e] from baker to hair stylist and bank clerk to video editor." The article notes many benefits of the apprenticeship system, but also some risks, especially in a global economic downturn.

Yahoo! News has just reprinted a TIME magazine article on young adults' widespread lack of health-insurance coverage and the implications of this situation for the ongoing congressional efforts to enact health care reform.

According to the article, one-third of 19-29 year-olds lack coverage. The reasons are varied: "These young adults are less likely to be offered employer-based coverage, earn less money to buy insurance on their own, are generally healthy and spend little time worrying about the worst-case scenarios that could befall them."

The last reason cited, regarding the mindset of many emerging adults, is probably the most interesting one to human development scholars, many of whom are interested in risk-taking and cognitive processes in adolescents and young adults. This perspective has not escaped the attention of policymakers, either. The article notes that, "A draft of the [Senate] Finance Committee's bill calls for a new category of health insurance specifically designed for what it calls 'young invincibles.'"

So imperative do experts consider health-insurance enrollment of young adults -- "to help spread out risk and keep older Americans' premiums from going even higher" -- that the legislation may ultimately include provisions to fine individuals who don't sign up for insurance packages that are offered. The hope, in the words of a Finance Committee aide quoted in the article, is that young adults will think, "You are still paying $950 for nothing or you pay a little bit more for something."

Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin's new book, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, focuses on the high rate of couple and family turnover in the U.S. Though the book's focus is on Americans' high rates of marriage, divorce, and re-partnering, Cherlin also addresses how the transition to adulthood in contemporary America may be linked with marital dynamics.

An illustrative statistic Cherlin cites is the percentage of women in different countries who have "three or more live-in partners (married or cohabiting) by age thirty-five" (p. 19). In the U.S., it's 10%, whereas in other English-speaking nations (those in Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), none was higher than 4.5%.

Early on, Cherlin states that, "The journey from adolescence to adulthood, so clear at mid [20th] century, is now a long slog filled with choices... We have gone from a lockstep pattern of getting married young, then having children, and for the most part staying married, to a bewildering set of alternatives..." (pp. 7-8).

Cherlin theorizes that contemporary trends in American marital/coupling behavior derive from two salient motivations in this country -- the desire to marry and the quest for "expressive individualism" (p. 9). The latter, which Cherlin identifies as a twentieth-century phenomenon, involves individuals' concerns with lifelong personal growth, which could propel some people to leave their marriages if they consider them psychologically and emotionally stagnant. The idea of constructing one's life to express and reflect one's personal values, of course, is a central facet of the concept of emerging adulthood.

The book's remaining analysis of young-adulthood transitions largely occurs through the lens of social class. Notes Cherlin, "What we are seeing is the emergence of two different ways of shooting the rapids of the transition to adulthood -- the process of completing one's education, developing a career, having children, and finding a lasting, intimate partnership. Among the college-educated, we see a more orderly, predictable sequence of events, one that has fewer changes of partners" (p. 167).

Among the college-educated, Cherlin states, a typical sequence is followed. These individuals will oftentimes finish school, take jobs, work for several years, get married (often after a period of cohabitation), then have children. In contrast, "[t]he strategy that many young adults in the bottom third of the educational distribution, and some in the middle third, use is to have children earlier, sometimes in a cohabiting relationship, sometimes as a lone parent... The marriages that do form among the less-educated are precarious. Over the past two or three decades, the divorce rate has fallen for women with college educations while remaining steady or rising for women without college degrees" (pp. 167-168).

Questions of cause and effect in family studies are always salient, because relevant processes are often difficult or impossible to manipulate experimentally (e.g., the effect of having children on marital satisfaction). Cherlin's book also delves into causality issues, which I summarize on my correlation-causality blog.

Yet another valuable aspect of the book is its discussion of family policy. This content will be helpful each time I teach Family Law and Public Policy. In short, although I purchased the book myself, I've found The Marriage-Go-Round to be a gift that keeps on giving!

This article in the University of North Carolina's Daily Tar Heel provides some national statistics on 2009 college graduates' difficulty of lining up jobs, compared to their 2007 and 2008 counterparts. Also, in support of common folk wisdom, a weak job market appears to be associated with greater student interest in graduate school.

“Right now we’re looking at around 39 percent, and typically we’re in the 25 percent range,” [UNC career services official Tim] Stiles said. “People want to park themselves in some graduate programs for the next few years to kind of ride things out.”

Much of the research on emerging adulthood implies that young people often voluntarily pursue post-graduate education in order to compete for "information age" jobs and to give themselves more time to "find themselves." In the present economic situation, the pursuit of additional education appears to be out of necessity in many cases.