When UT Austin sociologists (and married couple) Robert Crosnoe and Shannon E. Cavanagh first set out to research what eventually became their new book, The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times, their own children were in preschool.
“A grant was given to us to analyze the impact of the Great Recession of 2007-09 on people transitioning to adulthood, and the idea was that our study would be done within a few years,” says Crosnoe. “But we just didn’t find anything terribly interesting in the short-term effects. We became more interested in the long-term trends.”
Now, nearly two decades later, both of their kids are themselves young adults, and the initial study has grown into a sweeping, data-rich portrait of what it means to grow up in 21st-century America.
Their findings challenge the familiar hand-wringing about “adultolescence” and “lost generations.” Instead, Crosnoe and Cavanagh argue, the journey from adolescence to adulthood has long been shaped by slow, inexorable forces rather than single, seismic events.
I spoke to them recently about their book and its implications. A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation is below.
Rob, Shannon, welcome. Tell me about your new book. It sounds like it’s been a big endeavor for the two of you.
Robert Crosnoe: It’s the product of a large-scale study using a variety of data to look at how markers of the transition to adulthood — employment, education, family formation, mental health, and behavior — have changed over the course of the last 50 or so years, and whether those changes are more acute during times of crisis, like the Great Recession.
The basic thrust of what we found is that young adults today look very different than young adults from 50 years ago or even 25 years ago. But those changes do not represent the specific impact of any one thing, like a recession or the pandemic or the invention of the iPhone. It’s been a slow, gradual change over many decades. They look different today than they used to, but there’s really no critical period over the last 50 years that made that happen.
Is there a relatively technical way that you or the field defines what this period of young adulthood is?
Crosnoe: We picked 18 to 26, in part because of the data we had but also because the National Academy of Sciences used that marker and it was related to policies for young adults.
The whole idea of adolescence, to put it in context, is only about 120 years old. It came into existence because the times changed and you had these people who looked like adults but were treated like children. Now we all just think adolescence is this naturally occurring phenomenon, when in reality it was something we created.
The same thing is going on right now with young adulthood. The transition from being an adolescent to an adult is getting longer and longer, so now it seems like maybe this isn’t a transition anymore. Maybe it’s its own stage of the life course. That’s where a lot of the ambiguity comes into play.
What’s the argument of the book? What are the big changes over the period of time you’re covering?
Crosnoe: There are two buzzwords that people often use to describe these changes. One is the “lengthening” of this young adulthood period. The other, and this is going to sound more pejorative than people mean it, is the “disorder.” What that means is that young people are spending longer achieving what adults think of as the markers of adulthood: leaving home, finding a job, starting a family. And they’re doing it in a different and less predictable order than they did in the past.
What does that look like? Young adults are spending a lot longer in the educational system than they used to, not just because they’re pursuing higher education but because they might be going in and out of the educational system over time. They’re pushing back their entry into the labor market and spending more time in more insecure positions before they become full-time labor force participants.
Shannon Cavanagh: Family formation is also slowing down tremendously because of insecurity in the economic realm. Young adults today are less likely to cohabit, much more likely to remain single, and even less likely to get married. Teen fertility has never been lower than it has been in the last 15 years. So there’s a real slowing down.
The other thing to keep in mind, in family and in education and work, is the incredible inequality. There are some young people who are continuing on in education, gaining more degrees, and transitioning into paid full-time labor. Those people are also more likely to be in a cohabiting union and eventually move into marriage with children. Then there are tremendous numbers of young people who are not in work, not in school, not in romantic unions, and not tied to any institution that we think of as central to citizenship. That’s really striking. It’s mostly men, and disproportionately men of color, who are out of these primary social institutions like work or school or marriage.
Crosnoe: There’s a pretty clear trend that alcohol use, which is a big activity during this period of young adulthood, goes up by age, as you’d expect, but is going down overall over time. With depression, it’s the exact opposite. It goes down with age, but it’s going up by calendar year. So young people are less likely to be depressed as they get older, but they are more depressed as a cohort than 19-year-olds were before.
You’ve said that when you started this project, you were looking at how the Great Recession did or didn’t affect these observable trends. What did you conclude?
Crosnoe: We found that they really weren’t affected. For the most part, the long-term evolution of society trumps any one event. But when we interviewed young people, we found many (but not all) really thought they had been affected by the Great Recession. They would’ve predicted that the quantitative results would look very different.
We were comparing people who went through the transition to adulthood in the ‘90s, 2000s, and 2010s. The biggest influence on whether they felt they’d been negatively affected by the recession — whether they’d been screwed versus having this “grit” idea of “I came out better for it” — wasn’t their social class. It was whether they were downwardly mobile. Doing worse than their parents had done really made people look at the recession very negatively.
We also found something interesting: when we asked them about the transition to adulthood, nobody really talked about family formation at all. They only talked about work and school, even though almost half of them had already started families. They just didn’t bring it up, even though in some cases they were doing it.
You’ve both described these changes as being “due to economic insecurity” in a significant way. What do you mean by that, and how do you understand it as a driver of these trends?
Crosnoe: We’re talking about economic insecurity rather than overall economic outcomes. If you go back to before economic restructuring started in the 1970s, there was this middle part of the labor market where you didn’t really need a college education to guarantee a decent life. You could go into a job, stay in that job, and move forward with benefits over time. That has disappeared, and young people really struggle with that. They either need to go through higher education to find something more secure or they’re bouncing around a lot more during their twenties. Even those who go to college are going to be changing jobs a lot and be unsure about themselves. So it’s not so much that they’re economically disadvantaged, if you step back and look at their incomes, but that they’re uncertain about their economic futures.
Has that been something that has progressively been more the case in the last 50 years?
Cavanagh: Yes. Whether it’s real or not, there’s a general sense that there’s less security and also fewer “good jobs” out there, and that a lot of the jobs that are available are gig economy jobs and not at all secure. That makes independence, which is at the heart of the idea of what adulthood is, feel like a harder and harder thing to achieve.
Crosnoe: That’s where the marriage stuff comes in too. There’s this relatively new idea that young people feel like they need to meet some level of economic security before they marry. They want to get married; they just feel like they need to reach this bar. That idea is what’s pushing back the age of marriage, because it’s taking them longer and longer to think they’ve reached that bar. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to achieve it. It’s just that a 22-year-old today is going to be in a more uncertain terrain than one from 50 or 60 years ago, even if they eventually turn out fine.
Are there drivers other than economic ones? You were talking about people not being in churches, unions, the whole “Bowling Alone” phenomenon. Is that purely economically driven, or are there cultural or other macro drivers of these shifts?
Crosnoe: One thing we write about a lot in the book is parenting and the way that parents view their children. We’ve reached a point now where the majority of parents do not think that kids in their early twenties are adults. That’s a new thing, this whole idea of your kids being your kids a lot longer than they used to be. Your stage of active parenting is a lot longer.
This is certainly related to economic insecurity too, wanting to keep these kids in the nest longer and investing more in them to really launch them into adulthood, but it has generalized far beyond that to this idea that 20-somethings are not adults. And when we don’t think of them as adults, we don’t treat them as adults, which makes it harder for them to act like adults. It’s this self-reinforcing thing. It is related to economics, but it’s taken on a life of its own.
Cavanagh: I don’t think you can separate the cultural from the economic. You could try to parse it out, but these things move together.
Rob was talking about marriage. There’s a sociologist, Andrew Cherlin, who talks about how historically we thought of marriage as the cornerstone of adulthood, literally the first thing you build, and then you build your life around it. Now it’s the capstone. It’s the thing you do once you can afford everything and everything is in a row. Partly this is a cultural shift driven by generalized uncertainty about marriage and divorce, which feed into a general cautiousness. Then there’s the real economic reality that for many young people, there aren’t the kinds of jobs that can get them started. Forty percent of young men in our sample are neither in work nor school. That’s an incredible percent of young people not doing things, and no one’s going to want to marry them or have a child with them. We have underinvested in or limited supports for young people as they move into adulthood.
Crosnoe: I think the thing about “Bowling Alone” and social isolation is something we need to grapple with, and we don’t really know how things like the internet have affected that. We do know that young people are closer to their parents than they used to be, which seems like a good thing. But the decline in drinking really struck us because we thought, if you think of drinking as a marker of stress, in many ways you’d expect it to be increasing. But it’s decreasing, and there’s some evidence it decreased even more during the Great Recession. What is that suggesting? Well, it’s probably something about social isolation. Coupled with the depression stuff, the decline in drinking might be suggesting young people are a little bit more untethered now than they used to be in the past. That doesn’t mean we want kids to go out drinking, but we’re trying to think critically about what those trends are doing.
In your work you’ve identified five or six pathways young people typically take between the ages of 18 and 26 or so. What are those pathways in brief?
Crosnoe: They tend to be characterized by the age at which young people do things. The easy ones are the people who just stay single the whole time; that’s a path. There are a couple of pathways where they’re partnering and having kids at a really young age, versus ones where people are partnering eventually but never having kids within this 18-26 window, versus ones where they’re doing all of the above: having kids and going in and out of relationships.
For socioeconomic attainment, it’s the most disadvantaged — low education, leaving the educational system early, then having unstable employment trajectories — versus the people who go from high school to college to the labor market versus those who go from high school to college to some sort of extended educational state, usually graduate school, before entering the labor market.
And then there’s this group in the middle that’s a pretty sizable group, but it’s a throwback to the ‘60s and ‘70s. They leave high school, go into full employment, and stay there. Interestingly, they look a little bit more like the kids going through higher education than they do other high school graduates in terms of family formation, their health behavior, their depression, where they’re coming from. That group is also very heavily Latino.
Looking back on this project as a whole, what makes you most optimistic and most pessimistic?
Cavanagh: Reading the qualitative interviews and hearing how young people made sense of things, I saw a lot of grit. I learned a lot about how people make meaning. They were telling stories of, “We’re going to get through this, and I’m stronger because of this, and it’s going to be okay.” That wasn’t everyone, of course, but it was a lot of people. That was really interesting to me and hopeful. We make meaning all the time, and we mostly err on the side of optimism.
Crosnoe: The way we close this book is by acknowledging that young people today do not look the way young people did when we were born. And we adults tend to say, “Well, why aren’t they doing this? Why aren’t they doing that?” In reality, what’s really happening is that the world has changed. The world is not the same as it was 50 years ago, and young people are adapting to this new world. Our concerns too often are more about whether they’re following the rules we think are right based on the world we grew up in rather than the one we have created for them.
So, if we’re going to do this hand-wringing about what young adults are doing, it’s not about whether they’re growing up or not, because they are growing up. It’s whether they’re trying to play by rules that we set for them that no longer apply. And I take that as very hopeful. They’re going to find their way, and they’re going to change the script for us. And then someday they will probably look down at their kids and think that they’re not growing up too.
Is there something general you can say about the way young adults today look at the world, their values and priorities?
Crosnoe: I’ll say it this way: the goals that young people have today are really not that different than the goals we had. Eventually, they want to be in the same place we wanted to be.
They want a stable job, they want to get married, they want to have kids, but how they’re going to do that is what’s changing?
Crosnoe: Yeah. This is the thing. We talk about the decline of marriage. Most young people want to get married. And most of them will, over time, but not as young adults. The path they take to that goal is going to be different than what we took. So the book is really about how the path has changed, not how the goal has changed. That’s an important way of looking at this.
When we’re talking about building a life, the goals are really not that different. Young adults today just take a different path. They’re adapting to the world we created for them.
Shannon, what about you? How are they different or the same?
Cavanagh: I think they feel they’re navigating a very different world than even we did 25 or 30 years ago. What was very clear in the qualitative research is this idea of uncertainty, and that data is now eight years old. What would it look like if we did those interviews during the pandemic or thereafter? This is a generation that has grown up confronting 9/11, the Great Recession, the pandemic, two discontinuous terms of Trump. It’s a really intense historical moment. The way they talk about their lives reflects that there’s this kind of uncertainty.
At the same time, Rob is right: young people want to get married, they want a home, they want a job. They’re also rational. This is my critique of a lot of the low fertility discussion: It’s not that people’s values have shifted, but that we always do what’s rational based on the circumstances in front of us. In a world that feels less certain, the rational choice might not be to have five children.
Are you going to keep working on this project?
Cavanagh: Right now I am working with grad students to look at the effect that housing may play in slowing down family formation. Who are young adults living with, how long are they staying at their parents’ home, how that is slowing everything down? The cost of housing could be a real pinch to family building in general. I think it adds another layer to the stories we have about young people.
Crosnoe: I’m really interested in the parenting part. If your kids are going to have a more dependent relationship with you through their twenties and thirties, what does that mean for you as a parent who, in the old days, might be letting go of a lot of those responsibilities? Your active parenting phase is longer than it used to be. That’s really what I’m studying now.
People want that, I think. Their kids are their friends, and vice versa.
Crosnoe: They do. Parents and kids are a lot closer than they used to be. They spend more time together and they’re more connected. Some people view that as bad, like it’s delaying their independence, but as a parent, it’s hard for me to get upset about that.
Part of it is that parents are being more vigilant because their kids are having a longer path to independence. And part of it is they like this new model. They like maintaining the active role. Those things are all driving each other.
In the 20th century, there was a lot of research on parenting adolescents and what that would mean, because this new idea of what an adolescent was emerged. Now I think this century is going to be like: What is parenting a 25-year-old, or a 35-year-old?