As young people graduate and then head to college, we call them young adults. Yet are they?
Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, in Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, (third edition), posits that a lot must happen before true adulthood occurs. In the phrase he coined, his paradigm of emerging adulthood spans from age 18 to 29. By his thinking, it’s characterized by the age of identity exploration (trying out options or values), instability (changes in relationships, living arrangements, and jobs), self-focus (having few social obligations or daily duties to others), feeling in-between (not an adolescent, nor an adult), and the age of possibilities (to transform life for an ideal future).1
Milestones Not Reached Like Their Parents and Grandparents Had
Two decades ago, sociologists called this a changing timetable for adulthood, pointing to a Canadian study that reported 30-year-olds in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones that 25-year-olds did in the early 70s.2 It’s confusing in the U.S. as well because age-related markers make little sense:
- Driver’s licenses at age 16
- Legal majority and voting at 18
- Legally allowed to enjoy a beer or glass of wine at 21
- For tax purposes, dependent status until age 24
- Yet allowed on parent’s health insurance to age 26
Arnett points to fewer entry-level jobs, a general acceptance of premarital sex, birth control, and living together pushing marriage into a “maybe” milestone. Fertility sometimes has gotten sacrificed for career progression, and some couples point to climate change, loss of freedoms, and expense as reasons to forgo procreating.
As America celebrated its 250th year of independence, one in five U.S. adults report they do not expect to be financially independent. Ever!3
Skills Mastery That Makes All the Difference
Raffi Grinberg, a business leader, author, and educator, taught a popular Adulting 101 course at Boston College and now is an executive and co-founder of successful nonprofits and businesses. His book How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed (Until Just Now) sections skill sets into the mental ones, financial, relationship, and career skills before Grinberg’s last point to live on purpose.4
I appreciated the first section especially. Point two dealt with “Facing Rejection,” which hugely affects people’s self-esteem throughout life. Learn to manage it when younger. The fourth skill contains a hallmark of cognitive-behavioral therapy: “Reframe automatic thoughts.” Again, a lifelong skill that helps daily!
Jumping ahead to the relationship section, skill nine, “Have Good Conversations,” is a definite winner. As an individual and couples’ therapist, proper listening and asking for what we need can’t be stressed enough. Grinberg explains passive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive approaches, eschewing them for the proper assertive examples with “I-statements.” Yeah!
Working on friendship is another gem as Grinberg points out that friendships won’t happen automatically, and as adults, you won’t have a lot of time either, so effort in this department is well-spent unless you want to be isolated and lonely, which we therapists do not recommend. Skill 11, “Evolve With Your Parents,” warmed this family systems-trained therapist because we’re facing an unhelpful trend of cutoff and estrangement that propels more problems than it solves.
The practical, financial skill section begins with “Build Credit,” “Invest Your Money,” and several other gems to greatly lessen your stress level, along with the book’s last section on career skills such as “Ace Your First Job.”
It’s a comprehensive tome. Fourteen skills that, in Grinberg’s opinion, spell grown-up! I wish one more skill would have been added: kindness. That’s to everyone in an era where disrespect has been displayed and replicated. How parents treat one another sets a lifelong model of relationships (whether they’re good or bad), what we say on social media counts, and as Maya Angelou said, what people really remember is how you make them feel.
Summary
Even with a modicum of skills and well-paying jobs, some young adults struggle with facing a very different financial landscape than their parents faced. The trend causes financial planners to caution their clients, the parents, to protect their retirement and seriously look at the “return on investment for any given college major, especially when parents help to finance it or later help support their child who did.5
Therapists caution supportive parents not to do what their grown child can do for themselves, set boundaries on payback of loaned funds, and insist on tangible household contributions (cooking, laundry, shopping, chores). After all, it’s the way the real world works.
© 2026 by Loriann Oberlin, M.S., LCPC