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When did you realise you had finally grown up? It’s a trick question, obviously: maturity is just realising that life is full of things you don’t feel old enough for but somehow manage anyway, while getting better at pretending to know what you’re doing. But the question is worth asking nonetheless, because for gen Z the goalposts of grownup life are clearly shifting.
It’s a truism that adulting now comes later than it did to generations who still don’t consider adulting a verb, with 43% of 25-year-olds still living at home and plenty more jobless university graduates boomeranging back there this summer, thanks to a grim labour market. Since they’ll probably be working longer into what were once retirement years, perhaps it’s only natural that they’re taking longer to get started. But there’s a fine line between choosing to grow up more slowly and becoming trapped into a kind of limbo between childhood and adulthood, with nobody to pull you out of the morass beyond parents who aren’t sure how to handle this new life stage either.
If your unemployed 22-year-old is getting rejection after rejection, should you rewrite their job applications for them, or let them figure it out for themselves? What do you do with an 18-year-old too depressed to leave their bedroom, now they’re old enough to make their own GP appointments but not mature enough to know they need one? Kidulthood can be a minefield.
The idea that the state should recognise the years roughly between 18 and 25 as a phase distinct from either childhood or full adulthood, which needs its own tailored policies, is catching on around Westminster. The Nuffield Foundation thinktank, which has spent two years researching changing journeys to adulthood, held a seminar this week drawing together threads from academia to Alan Milburn’s genuinely thoughtful review of what is causing so many young people to be Neet (not in education, employment or training). As Milburn put it to the Nuffield Foundation’s Carey Oppenheim, councils have to ensure that teenagers are studying or training up to 18, but what happens after that is not their problem. Yet in the Netherlands, the state’s responsibilities extend up to 24 or, in some cases, 27. Guess which country has fewer Neets.
More broadly, he suggested, the British state may be too quick to shrug off responsibility for young people struggling with the transition to adulthood. “We haven’t aligned now with the reality of the transitions that young people are going through in their lives,” he said.
In Australia, Oppenheim points out, the equivalent of Britain’s children and adolescent mental health services runs from age 12 right up to age 25, recognising a growing argument within medicine that adolescence doesn’t end neatly at 19. But in Britain, teenagers still hit a cliff edge, tumbling abruptly out of children’s mental health services into adult ones where the threshold for intervention can be far higher. Even the new social media ban for under-16s assumes teenagers are mature enough at 17 to handle what they couldn’t the day before.
Meanwhile the IPPR thinktank’s State of A Generation project, another deep dive into the coming of age process, warns of a society where “transitions to adulthood are blocked” and young people are increasingly nihilistic about their future.
There’s much we still don’t understand about this evolving life stage, including how far to accept it and how far to push back. If a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds living with their parents say they’re genuinely happy at home or not ready to leave, rather than feeling stuck, does that imply a worrying failure to launch? Or, as the demographer Prof Ann Berrington argues, a new form of “privileged dependence”, where some young people enjoy a financial and emotional security that ultimately boosts them into adult life, and it’s the young people who can’t go home in a crisis we should worry about?
There’s an obvious danger here of over-babying young people, potentially making them even more anxious in the process, or of the state intruding too far into the lives of twentysomethings who are coping fine. As the parent of a 19-year-old, I’m well aware that gen Z are often far more resilient and competent than they get credit for.
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But a significant minority do seem to be falling into a gap between childhood and adulthood, and in a chilly economic climate they look increasingly exposed. Maybe the real mark of having finally grown up is feeling ready to help someone else do the same.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
