What Does It Mean To Be An Adult?
One thing that stands out about our current moment is how late people seem to grow up compared to past generations. A few centuries back, teenagers counted as adults. A fourteen-year-old might already be working as an apprentice and raising a family. People also died much younger then, so the timeline looked different from top to bottom.
Ask a child what an adult is and the answer tends to be short: someone older. Push a little further and the picture fills in. Adults, to a kid, seem authoritative and decisive, people who never second-guess themselves.
The legal version arrives in stages. At sixteen you can learn to drive and take a job. Two years after that you register for Selective Service and vote. The milestones everyone circles, though, are twenty-one and twenty-five. Twenty-one brings the legal right to drink; twenty-five lets you rent a car and watch your auto insurance rate start to fall. Twenty-five also happens to be roughly when the brain finishes its built-in growth.
Then there's the definition that took hold after World War II: the married homeowner, settled in his business, providing for his family, with a wife who kept that family running. Those are heavy obligations, and carrying them demands real growth, maybe more so now that technology has pushed the pace of everyday life to something close to superhuman speed.
Psychology frames it differently. Here the adult is self-sufficient, someone who takes the wheel of their own life and answers for their choices. Reaching that point in the twenty-first century, with everything the postmodern world throws at you, says a person has moved a long way from childhood.
It lines up with an older idea of adulthood from the 1930s and 1940s: sophisticated, knowledgeable, worldly in the complimentary sense of the word. You can watch those qualities walk across the screen in films from the Depression and war years. Put on an old movie with Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant, or go a couple decades later to John Wayne and his polished cowboy manner, and you're looking at the stock image of the American adult male. If you want a sense of what poise and elegance look like, that's as good a place as any to start.
Lately we've got the opposite figure, sometimes called the kidult or the perpetual adolescent. This is the person who hugs their inner child close: wearing the fashions of the generation below them, playing video games, listening to teeny-bopper music, reading juvenile fiction. They decline to act their age.
That isn't automatically a flaw. Staying tuned in to younger people can keep you charismatic and might even extend your life. It can make work easier to find later on if you read as hip, and a carefree attitude sheds stress in a way that can knock a couple decades off how you look.
So what divides a kidult from an adult? Maturity and care. You can lean on an adult because they've been through things and they take responsibility. They don't live only for themselves. They live for the people counting on them, whether that's aging parents, their kids, a partner, or the coworkers beside them.
Responsibility is the operative word. You cannot call yourself a true adult while ducking responsibility in any part of your life; dropping it is a clear sign of stalled growth. The flip side holds too. You can be a kidult and still be fully responsible where it matters, especially if you treat the people around you with compassion. The trick is balance: owning your obligations without taking life so seriously that there's no room left for humor.
Being an adult comes down to how responsible you are with yourself and toward others. Past that, staying in touch with your inner child does no harm, as long as you know when to get serious. It might even make you more mature than people give you credit for, since it lightens the weight that all those grown-up responsibilities pile on.
So those are my thoughts on what makes an adult in the U.S. these days. What do you think? - Erwin Wooten