When Do You Become an Adult?

What qualities make you an actual adult, by when should we become actual adults, and is maturity necessary for happiness?

Hello, good people! Last year, a coach came by my office one day to tell me about an interaction she’d just had with one of her high school athletes. This young lady—let’s call her Karen—arrived in the middle of morning practice, bawling hysterically. The coach pulled Karen aside to calm her down and find out what was going on. Karen responded with a shrieking: “My mom doesn’t love me!”

Apparently, Karen’s parents had to be at work early that day. Karen was supposed to set an alarm and get herself ready in time to catch a ride with one of her teammates. But Karen’s alarm did not wake her. Neither did the phone call from her friend (kids today do not ring doorbells). When Karen finally woke up, she called her mom, expecting that mom would leave work to take her to school. But her mother told Karen that she couldn’t leave and that Karen would need to walk to school, which was about a mile away. Cue the epic meltdown.

Karen was convinced that this was tantamount to child abuse. As she said, “I could have been hit by a car.” She then went on to assert that her mother could have at least called her an Uber.

Most educators have dozens of similar stories. Admittedly, this one might be a bit more extreme than most, but the characteristics are all the same: disturbing entitlement and self-absorption, staggering fragility, and the glaring absence of any recognition that high school students should be on the cusp of becoming full, capable adults.

Most high school students today are nowhere near ready to be autonomous adults, nor does it cross their mind that they should be. The reason for this is obvious. We no longer expect students to be adults by the time they are 18 (which is much to the detriment of our students). This prompts the question: When do you become an adult?

When Do You Become an Adult?

To clarify, by “adult” I don’t mean a legal age of adulthood, but, rather, a level of maturity and displayed capability. Creating capable, admirable adults was once the obvious point of parenting. Age 18 was the obvious deadline where it was time for a budding adult to either “sink or swim.” Situations varied—obvious extenuating circumstances existed—but that deadline for dependency guided the expectations of parents, teachers, and the culture at large. 

Today, parents email high school teachers to ask what their kid can do to bring up a grade, why their kid was corrected in front of the entire class, what those zeroes in the gradebook were for, or to fight for the teacher to remove consequences. Gone are the days of: “I can assure you, he will get it worse from us when he gets home.” 

Parents will accompany their high school freshmen into the training room when they need treatment, drop them off at school even though they live across the street, and come zooming up to the building when Junior forgets his work at home. Too many have forgotten that the point of parenting isn’t to provide far more than is necessary and protect against every possible pain. In fact, some pain and discomfort is absolutely necessary for the formation of great people. The point of parenting is supposed to be to create great adults, capable of thriving in a chaotic world. 

Try Adulting. You Will Love It!

Each year, I tell my freshmen males that they are no longer children and that my expectation is that they become men. It is obvious that most of them have never heard anything like this. At first, they don’t seem to like it and they don’t seem to know what makes manhood different from boyhood (other than more of that pesky responsibility). There is no image—no Spartan warriors, commanding leaders, or even larger than life teachers that they aspire to become. To most 14-year-old boys, the path to becoming a man just sounds like a lot more work. If you gave them the choice, they’d prefer to remain children—to perpetuate the low expectations and impulsivity that they’ve been allowed.

However, after a few months of clear expectations and ruthless accountability, you can see them develop a swagger. They start to feel different. They like it. They take pride in doing things the right way. They stand up straighter. They look you in the eye and say hi in the hallways. They chuckle when other athletes still don’t get it. They’ve had a taste of discipline and they don’t want to go back.

According to self-determination theory, humans need three things to be content:

1. Competency

2. Authenticity

3. Connection

But Americans, particularly young Americans, are less likely than ever to engage in the hard, vulnerable experiences that stretch them, teach them about their authentic selves, and connect them to others. They are more likely to spend their lives curating whatever phony image is cool in their particular cyber bubble. They are less likely to go out with friends and more likely to live with their parents and have parents pay their bills for them well into their late 20s and 30s. 

Much of this is the result of our unique modern moment. Every society once depended upon the competency of all of its citizens to meet the fundamental needs of the community. By contrast, for the first time in history, we can all enjoy a once-incomprehensible level of abundance, comfort, and convenience based almost entirely on the backs of a small elite class. The average citizen isn’t called upon to make roads, defend walls, or even to obtain food. We just need them to be consumers. 

Obviously, the absence of child labor and a looming military draft are a wonderful thing. But with that absence (and our radical abundance) has come rampant and widespread immaturity. And with that has come widespread meaninglessness and mental health dysfunction.

The lack of clarity about what it means to be an adult and the tendency to continuously delay adulthood have been bad for our younger generations. 

Which prompts a few questions:

What qualities and capabilities do we (or, should we) as a society expect from adults? What expectations would be best for our kids, our families, and our communities?

When do you become an adult?

When did you? 

Clarify the Path

Until recently, every society had very clear answers to these questions, Every society took painstaking care to inculcate the qualities and capabilities that they expected, and every society had very clear rites of passage to clarify standards and mark transitions. 

Today, our rites of passage are basically automatic. As long as you don’t quit, you will graduate high school. Your parents will likely pay for your first smartphone, your expensive prom, and your first car. Even the expectation of earning a driver’s license is at risk of being phased out if self-driving cars become the new norm. 

The fact that technology allows us to get by without attaining a broad spectrum of basic competencies makes it more necessary than ever that we clarify and define what expectations matter. Otherwise, there is nothing to stop us from becoming, well, this…

 

Source: WALL-E, Disney and Pixar

The best thing we can do for our children, parents, and communities is to clarify the answers to these two questions:

1. What qualities and capabilities should we as a society expect from adults? 

2. When do you become an adult?

Answering that could fill an entire book, but I’ll offer some brief answers to get you thinking. 

What qualities should we, as a society, expect from adults?

• Personal responsibility. All adults need to accept responsibility for the success or failure of their own life. Regardless of your disadvantages, you cannot be an adult until you accept that your happiness, your success, and your life are no one’s responsibility but your own. 

• Courage. Most of adulthood cannot be explicitly prepared for. It is a process of figuring life out by acting within it. This is the only way to develop competence, confidence, or leadership. 

• Discipline. The ability to willingly enter discomfort on behalf of a larger purpose. If you cannot control yourself, you are not an adult. 

• Love of others. Children live for themselves. Adults are committed to something bigger than themselves. They understand that they are only a very small part of a much larger story. 

• A desire to learn. Without this, I don’t think success is possible. 

What capabilities should we, as a society, expect from adults?

(This would be a far better core curriculum.)

• The capacity to handle personal finances. Adults need a firm understanding of compound interest and its opposite, debt.

• The capacity to thrive physically. This requires a firm understanding of how humans thrive mentally and physically. They need to understand the foundations of nutrition and physical health, the foundations of habit and behavior change, and to have experience practicing basic health maintenance habits like exercise and cooking.

• The capacity to understand the human psychology that drives them and their neighbors. Every adult needs to understand cognitive biases and how they plague us all. Everyone needs to understand a few profound psychological quirks like the paradox of choice. Everyone needs to understand Jonathan Haidt’s elephant and rider analogy, and Richard Thaler and Cuss Sunstein’s profound research on the impact of environmental design. And much like we once expected people to know how to work on their own car, all adults need to have a sense of how to troubleshoot their own mind. 

• Adults need to understand manipulation and have the logical toolkit necessary for truth-seeking. Marketing is nothing more than propaganda. Today that marketing exploits us more brilliantly than ever, yet most people presume it has no effect on them. We need to arm adults with the capacity to navigate a marketing saturated environment. As Dorothy Sayers said in her famous 1947 speech on the lost tools of education:

“We who were scandalised in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished….”

• Relationships. All adults need to know the expectations of proper conduct in courting and romantic relationships as well as clear expectations for how they treat friends, family, and other people. All adults need to understand the basic characteristics of dysfunctional relationships and how to set boundaries. 

• Communication. Adults need to understand the power of body language. They need to understand how to form a persuasive argument (rhetoric). They should be capable of expressing themselves clearly in written form and speech, ESPECIALLY, because public speaking is so often feared.

I wonder what else I missed. 

When do you become an adult? 

• Whenever you are one. Obviously, we all come up short in many areas and we are never fully complete. But I’d say we should be autonomous and fully on this trajectory by age 18. The best way to accomplish this would be to start young-adults on a probationary adulthood preparation program at about age 13, which would conclude with a rite of passage at around age 18. 

In my book, I talk a lot about Rites of Passage and I conclude with a chapter titled: The Transition to Adulthood. More than anything else right now, helping to clarify an exciting and inspiring path to adulthood is what motivates me. More to come…

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Thank you for reading today. Please share with any kindred spirits who would enjoy.

This musing was prompted by a great podcast between Will Braunstein and the author of Milestone to Manhood, Steven Arms. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend listening to that podcast as well as an amazing book by Pastor Jon Tyson called The Intentional Father. 

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane