America’s Confusion Over Adulthood
DURING a heated exchange with NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch at last week’s CNN Town Hall in Parkland, Fla., Sheriff Scott Israel pronounced: “18-year olds should never have a rifle.”
President Trump seemed to agree. Earlier that day at his own town hall, the president called for raising the legal age of purchase for semiautomatic guns to 21.
What made these declarations stand out is that for a long time 18 meant the start of official adulthood in America. Wherever you might come down in our current guncontrol debate, the bigger question is when, finally, does a child become an adult in America?
These suggestions of raising the age for gun purchases came during the same week that the widely praised and forceful outpouring of civic engagement by Stoneman Douglas HS students led commentators to argue the voting age should be lowered to 16. The students, so articulate about their grief and the changes they hope to see in their country, seemed like ideal voters.
We have long complained about the extended adolescence our children enjoy, but perhaps the problem is that it’s the grownups muddling the time frame. We send mixed messages about when adulthood begins and what will be expected once it arrives.
It wasn’t always this way. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Allan Metcalf notes that “until the teen age was invented, that was the goal of children: to become adult as soon as possible, to escape the limitations of childhood.”
But somewhere along the way we came up with this middle ground and, to our detriment, this middle ground is seen as the brightest, happiest time — old enough to have fun, young enough to avoid real responsibility.
Then 18 rolls around. Called “the age of majority,” it’s when one is officially afforded many of the rights of a grown-up. But not all.
An 18-year-old can vote or join the military but not buy beer or, in some states like New York, cigarettes. You have to be 21 to gamble in Atlantic City or Las Vegas.
On the other hand: When they commit a crime, we try juveniles as young as 13 as adults even though we know their cognitive abilities aren’t mature.
Meanwhile, a Pew Research study last year found that kids are living at home longer than ever before. They can stay on their parent’s insurance until they’re 26.
And they stay on parents’ cellphone and Netflix plans even longer than that. In 2013, Sue Shellenbarger noted in The Wall Street Journal that “More than 2 in 5 parents of 18- to 35-year-old children still pay for their kids’ cellphone service, and 29 percent continue to do so even after their kids have moved out and stopped relying on them to pay rent.”
If the benefits, and responsibilities, of adulthood keep getting deferred, is it any wonder kids have a hard time growing up?
Thomas Hine’s book “The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager” traces the birth of teenagehood as a life era to a 1941 article in Popular Science magazine. Since then, we’ve turned it into a lifestyle, and we keep putting off when the end of that lifestyle is supposed to happen.
It’s gotten so bad that “adulting” — that is, behaving like an adult — is now in regular use. There are thousands of articles, listicles and memes discussing how chores and errands that used to go unmentioned in everyday life are now torturous. Getting gas, going to the bank, cleaning out your fridge, paying bills are all near-impossible tasks for people not ready to be adults.
In a never-ending adolescence, where 30 is the new 20 and 40 is the new 30 and so on, no expectations are ever set about how life is supposed to go.
Maybe adulting is so difficult because we are so unclear about what it is and when it begins and we keep blurring the lines. The problem isn’t raising the age at which someone can own a gun, but more that we have no set schedule to guide our adolescents into the world of the grown-up where they can smoke, drink, vote and, yes, own guns if they choose to.
It’s not clear whether 21 or 18 or some other age is where the line should be drawn, but it’s confusing to not really have a line at all. Adulting is hard enough.