When Do We Become Adults, Really?

Summary

Life stages became more standardized in the late nineteenth century, as mandatory schooling spread, and legal thresholds of adulthood were set in the twentieth century. In 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment instituted eighteen as the voting age in America, and, in 1989, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child promised protections for people under eighteen. Meanwhile, retirement ages and pensions set parameters for the beginning of old age. Arnett developed the category of “emerging adult” after many twentysomethings told him, in the nineteen-nineties, that they didn’t identify as adults—they felt “off time,” he told me. Arnett thought that age-based life stages seemed increasingly outdated, given that people were, on average, getting married later, leaving school later, finding jobs later. The novel stage of emerging adulthood reflected modern life. “Some people, when I proposed it, said, ‘You can’t just invent a new life stage,’ ” Arnett said. “There was this assumption that they’re universal and they’re fixed. I didn’t see them that way.”Neither does Clare Mehta, a psychologist at Emmanuel College who works with Arnett, and who came up with the term established adulthood. Mehta argued that psychologists had neglected this busy period when they had consolidated adulthood into a monolith. She saw people between thirty and forty-five trying to balance careers, marriages, and children for the first time. Established adults hadn’t yet reached the apex of their careers; some had young children at home, and, for most in this life stage, neither major health issues nor menopause had typically set in.Mehta’s research, which is ongoing, includes interviews with people my age. During a two-hour Zoom call, she asked about my life. I didn’t want to define my stage in terms of discrete events such as buying property or exchanging vows, although I had recently done both of those things; after all, I could imagine doing those same activities in my twenties, just in a very ch...