Age legislation is a case in point. The law adheres to a pluralist conception of maturity denoting various competencies that are distributed among a range of ages. Thus, entry into adulthood is conceived in extraordinarily fragmented terms. For instance, depending on the age difference between partners, sexual preferences, and state legislation, the age of consent ranges from 14 to 18 in the United States and from 10 to 18 in Australia. The age of criminal responsibility in the U.S. is as low as 7 depending on state legislature (not all states specify minimum ages) (CNIJ 1997). In Australia it is 10, while in other countries it is 14 (Austria, Germany), 16 (Japan, Spain) or 18 years of age (Belgium, Luxembourg) (Urbas 2000; AIC 2003 ).7 A variety of other acts are deemed legal at different ages. In Australia, movies rated “M” for mature may be viewed from age 15, the same age at which individuals are free to leave school of their own accord. Cinema goers have to purchase full-price tickets from age 16, the age at which people can opt to get tattooed and are allowed to purchase cigarettes. At age 18 individuals are permitted to vote, carry firearms, get married, make medical decisions, and so forth (Sunday Age 1992; Urbas 2000; DHA 2003). This illustrates that entry to adulthood, as far as legislation is concerned, occurs on a continuum along which rights and obligations are incrementally attributed. Even if we were to speak of a legal adulthood that comes with the attainment of full legal rights and obligations at age 18, 19, or 21, this does not pertain to noncitizens regardless of age (e.g., permanent residents, prisoners, refugees, and asylum seekers). And although they are in principle, in fact individuals are neither guaranteed equal access to the law, nor protected from structural exclusion.
These official ambiguities are in tension with “informal age norms” (Settersten 2003) that function as cultural reference points to behavior and status. The relationship between age and the classic markers of adulthood is an example, for the latter depend for normative effectiveness on when in a person's life they are achieved. Stable relationships or parenthood, work or independent living attained too soon may be interpreted as signs of precociousness or deviance rather than adult competence. Likewise, late attainment may entail physical risks (childbirth); it may be increasingly difficult (work), or deemed behind schedule (marriage, independent living). Clearly, what is regarded as late or early is historically and culturally contingent. We may also think about the significance of the twenty-first birthday in some societies, or the confidence with which individuals remark on how young or old somebody looks “for their age” without the slightest need for expert opinion. This is not to privilege informal over formal age norms on points of accuracy, however. Ageism can be institutionalized both in everyday interaction as well as in the official sense. Whether this pertains to discrimination against elderly individuals, or to disrespect of those who simply appear to be too young to be given credence for full adult status, age is a powerful ascriptive force in contemporary society. In fact, age norms are an exception to Parsons' (1951 ) rule that with modernity premodern ascription gives way to achievement, that status is now exclusively a matter of individual action rather than predetermined parameters. To the contrary, informal as well as formal age norms are social facts that are culturally reproduced and shored up. They facilitate and inhibit social participation. They are markers of inclusion just as much as they are points of discrimination.
We can see, then, that the practical, everyday taken-for-grantedness of adulthood is at odds with its conceptual indeterminacy. Neither official age grading nor the attribution of rights and obligations; neither biological characteristics nor psychological traits; neither formal nor informal age norms; neither fixed roles nor rites of passage can be drawn upon to delineate and therefore define adulthood. All these aspects are in silent tension with one another, contradictory, imperfectly integrated. Yet, in the social imagination adulthood remains the central stage of the biography—that which childhood moves toward and which old age has left behind.
Prolonged Adolescence, Postponed Adulthood?
Media reports consistently focus on the practices of young people who according to cultural age norms ought to be grown up, but are described as at best deferring and at worst rejecting adulthood. These reports by and large attempt to come to grips with the social trends that underpin the alleged problems of contemporary young adulthood: prolonged stay in or episodic returns to the parental home; delayed or altogether forfeited marriage and family formation; drifting from temporary job to temporary job; or the repudiation of long-term aspirations in favor of short-term goals and experimental living. Some selected headlines from newspapers and magazines exemplify this discourse. Here, those who ask “Why Today's Teenagers are Growing up Early” (Sydney Morning Herald 2001a) are countered by a majority typically expressing sentiments along these lines: “Now Wait til 35 for Coming of Age” (Australian 2001), “‘Adults’ Fail the Age Test” (Herald Sun 2004), “Kids Who Refuse to Grow Up” (Herald Sun 2003), and “Forever Young Adultescents Won't Grow Up” (MX Australia 2004). Articles of this kind are mostly based on the claims of market researchers who believe that the “fundamental philosophy [of people in their twenties and beyond] is a deferment of any sort of commitment…Underpinning that is a sense of the now, and little sense of the future” (Australian 2004). In keeping with their arguments, and to enable them to target new consumer demographics, marketing professionals offer a number of labels describing individuals who are said to be averse to growing up. These descriptors are readily taken up in the media where there is talk about the rise of “adultescents,” “kidults,” and “twixters” in the U.S. and Australia, “boomerang kids” in Canada, Nesthocker in Germany, mammone in Italy, and KIPPERS (Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings) in the U.K. (Time 2005a; Time 2005b).8
Social scientists have evolved their own concepts to accommodate essentially the same view. Indeed, media attention to young people's deferral or rejection of adulthood can draw on expert advice with a long history. Although in reality a number of approaches differ in nuance, for analytic clarity I subsume these under the delayed adulthood thesis. As intimated above, twentieth-century North American notions of adolescence as a period of “structured irresponsibility” (Parsons 1942a) and as “identity crisis” (Erikson 1950) can be considered paradigmatic of Western culture's perceptions and treatment of adolescents up to the present. Taking the “storm and stress” view as a given, psychoanalyst Peter Blos (1941) coined the term “post-adolescence.” It designates a stage of life inhabited by individuals who have outgrown adolescence, but have not yet reached adulthood. These are individuals who, according to Keniston (1970: 634), “far from seeking the adult prerogative of their parents…vehemently demand a virtually indefinite prolongation of their nonadult state.” Erikson's (1968) “prolonged adolescence” neatly encapsulates this idea—a vision that continues to have currency today. What for marketers and journalists are twixters, adultescents, and kidults, for social scientists are lives led in a manner that is analogous with a particular image of adolescence: a time of irresponsibility where few decisions have to be made, and the capacity to reconcile “work and love” has not yet been completely attained. Consequently, contemporary trends are then equated with a prolonged transition to and delayed entry into full adulthood (e.g., Côté 2000; Furstenberg et al. 2003, 2004; Arnett 2004; Settersten et al. 2005; Schwartz et al. 2005).
Sociologist Frank Furedi (2003: 5) is unequivocal in his condemnation of what he perceives to be an “infantilisation of contemporary society.” Taking umbrage at adults' alleged “present-day obsession with childish things”—gadgetry of all kinds, including soft toys and children's books—he asserts: “Hesitations about embracing adulthood reflect a diminished aspiration for independence, commitment and experimentation.” His agreement with social psychologist Stephen Richardson, who holds that “we do not reach maturity until the age of 35” (quoted in