Studies and surveys report that being “in dependence” is not exactly the independence of prior generations.

Two authors add insights into what exactly we call adulthood and being a grown up.

Financially aiding 20- or early 30-something offspring is common yet has its concerns.

Skill acquisition matters, and good news: It’s never too late to teach and acquire proficiency.

As young people graduate and then head to college, we call them young adults. Yet are they?

Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, in Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, (third edition), posits that a lot must happen before true adulthood occurs. In the phrase he coined, his paradigm of emerging adulthood spans from age 18 to 29. By his thinking, it’s characterized by the age of identity exploration (trying out options or values), instability (changes in relationships, living arrangements, and jobs), self-focus (having few social obligations or daily duties to others), feeling in-between (not an adolescent, nor an adult), and the age of possibilities (to transform life for an ideal future).1

Milestones Not Reached Like Their Parents and Grandparents Had

Two decades ago, sociologists called this a changing timetable for adulthood, pointing to a Canadian study that reported 30-year-olds in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones that 25-year-olds did in the early 70s.2 It’s confusing in the U.S. as well because age-related markers make little sense:

Driver’s licenses at age 16

Legal majority and voting at 18

Legally allowed to enjoy a beer or glass of wine at 21

For tax purposes, dependent........

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