In May 2010, The New Yorker magazine was published with a very suggestive cover: it showed a man with moving boxes, placing his doctorate on the wall of his old room in his parents’ house, an example of a phenomenon very common today. , the “eternal teenagers”.
It is becoming increasingly common to find men and women in their thirties (in some major cases), who have not yet assumed the responsibilities of “adulthood”. The U. S. Census Bureau reports that by 1970, 77% of women and 65% of 30-year-old men had successfully completed their education, moved, were economically independent, married, and had a child; however, by 2000, less than 50% of women and one-third of 30-year-olds had achieved the same targets.
- Don’t the young people of today have the same goals.
- Because they can’t or simply because they aren’t interested? Why are people currently struggling to get over adolescence? Are there multiple elements that fuel this? Fashion? Eternal teenagers.
- Including the economy.
Derek Thompson, in his article “Late Maturity: How the Recession Affected Generation Y,” said 49% of people between the age of 18 and 34 worked solely to pay the bills, 35% returned to school due to financial pressure, and 22% postponed birth. The cost of college education has increased significantly in the last thirty years University debt and the decrease in the value of properties reduce the desire to have a home and form a new family If in this report the author presents the statistics of the phenomenon in the United States, it can also be applied elsewhere.
Others refer to the world of entertainment and pop culture as the culprits for delayed maturity. While the heroes of the past struggled to make the right decisions, movies, television series and their protagonists today show an irresponsible and unbalanced lifestyle. , people between 20 and 30 years old read the newspaper, interested in art or charity.
Some authors argue that acting like a twenty-something teenager is biologically normal. Child psychologist Laverne Antrobus says neuroscience has shown that a person’s cognitive knowledge develops after age eighteen, and that emotional maturity, self-concept and judgment are affected until the prefrontal cortex is fully developed at this stage, in addition to brain development, there is high hormonal activity.
“The idea that at 18 you suddenly become an adult is not entirely correct,” said Laverne Antrobus, who works at the Tavistock Clinic in London. She and other psychologists recognize that adolescence lasts until she is twenty-five.
Another important factor is human life expectancy, which has increased in recent years, according to recent studies, men live eleven years and women 12 years older than people from forty years ago, resulting in a delay in maturity to twenty years and retirement, which currently hovers around seventy.
We still can’t clearly determine the right age for late adolescence. What do you think, is this a change for good or evil?If we follow this trend, will the future be bleak or favorable?
Obs: Generation Y: a term used to refer to people born in the 1980s and 1990s.