Have we always been anxious about "adulting"?

23 January 2025 | By: Newcastle University | 4 min read

Many young people today feel they’re not ready to reach the ‘traditional’ markers of maturity - but a ground-breaking new book reveals adulthood has always been out of many people’s reach.

Here, Dr Laura Tisdall explores how what it means to be an adult has changed through history.

The rise of the ‘kidult’?

In recent decades, the average age at which people in the Global North marry, buy their first house, or have children has increased from a historic low in the 1950s. Many millennials feel this means that they’re not ‘adulting' properly.

‘Is Western culture stopping people from growing up?’ asked The Economist in August 2024. In case the reader didn’t get the point, the article added a subheading: ‘RIP adulthood,¹ arguing that it’s pop culture that contributes to infantilising adults.

The Economist is not the only media outlet to tell us that adulthood is disappearing. Popular anxieties in the press and on social media claim we’re afflicted by a plague of ‘kidults’ who are doing ‘adulting’ wrong.

In countries like the United States and Britain, there has been a dramatic fall in the share of people who, by the age of 30, have attained the traditional markers of adulthood. In Britain, the median age for a first (heterosexual) marriage, at 33 for men and 31 for women, is a decade higher than it was in the early 1960s. In 2016, a Pew study found that for the first time in 130 years, American 18 to 34-year-olds were more likely to be living with their parents than with a partner in a separate household.²

It is millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, who are usually targeted as the generation failing to meet traditional milestones of adulthood.

FromBlog_Adulting_StressedMillennial_sm Millennials are often the targets of criticism.

Generation Z – growing up too fast

The next generation down, Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are also seen to be doing adulthood wrong. But in contrast to ‘spoilt’ millennials, who have been seen as unreliable employees since they first started entering the workplace, Gen Z are often portrayed as ‘old before their time’.

Rather than ‘Generation Me’, they are ‘Generation Sensible’, missing out on the partying that ought to define adolescence and young adulthood³.

But these stereotypes are relatively new, and they don’t capture how adulthood has been understood throughout history.

After the Second World War, the average age of first marriage and first child fell to historic lows in Britain. The economic boom in the 1950s allowed young people to set up their own households earlier than ever before. Our ideas of what it means to be an ‘adult’ today are still based on this very unusual period.

Chronological age has never been the only marker of adulthood, especially in pre-modern periods. Even now, young people often talk about their maturity in terms of life milestones rather than chronological age.

Was there ever ‘a right kind of adult’?

Older people have told younger people throughout history that they need to step up to their responsibilities. Ask the medieval monks who despaired over the ‘childishness’ of newly recruited men, who, as the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux put it in the twelfth century, were ‘vehemently indiscreet, indeed absolutely intemperate, and exceedingly stubborn’⁴.

I’ve recently co-edited a fascinating new book that argues that in the past, just as in the present, people have often struggled to live up to expectations of what ‘being an adult’ means.

Adulthood from 1350 to Generation Z

The book, Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z, explores how although concepts of adulthood have changed over time in Britain and the United States, there have always been societal anxieties about ‘the youth of today’.

Through 11 case studies, the book investigates how being an adult was understood from the medieval period right up to the 21st century. It also explores how this intersected with other identities such as gender, race, class, sexuality and disability. Who gets to be an adult? And who decides.

It is the first time that a collection of essays has focused on adulthood as a way to examine ideas of power and inequality throughout history.

FromBlog_Adulting_AdulthoodBook_sm

Colonialism and infantilisation

The book looks at ways in which both the UK and US exported cultural ideas about being an adult to deny rights to colonised and oppressed people. During the 19th century, for example, the indigenous population in India was commonly viewed by British imperialists as ‘childlike’. A century later, during the Cold War, African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents in Britain still had to ‘adult’ to a higher standard to be taken seriously.

The legacy of colonialism also influenced views towards young people in their experiences of the juvenile court system in Britain and the United States, with children of colour historically being more likely to be treated as adult defendants than their white counterparts and consequently given harsher sentences.

Other chapters in the book discuss how throughout history, definitions of adulthood have negatively affected other marginalised groups including women, gay men and disabled people, preventing them from achieving ‘adult’ milestones such as getting married, owning property – or even getting a job or promotion at work.

Defining adulthood and its complexities

Not necessarily a milestone and not always a crisis, adulthood – as the contributors to this book make clear – has been imposed, aspired to, denied, rejected and contested in multiple ways over the past six centuries.

As Kristine Alexander observes in the collection afterword, ‘Adulthood, it turns out, is many things.’ By interrogating adulthood as a category of analysis, we hope this collection opens up new avenues of research that consider how far adulthood, shaped by intersectional identities, has defined relationships of power across time and place.

Where you can find the book

Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z, edited by Maria Cannon and Laura Tisdall, is published by University of London Press in association with the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society. It is published as part of the New Historical Perspectives series, an open access book series for early career scholars.

Order a copy or access the collection for free