Why becoming an adult means something very different when you’re poor

[Judi Lynn]

Why becoming an adult means something very different when you’re poor
By Emily Badger April 19 at 7:53 AM

Academics have a phrase for the wandering years between the teens and full-blown adulthood, that time when young adults try on pre-med majors and discard them, when they take false starts into the working world or intern ad nauseam. When they are still editing their identities. I'm into computers! No, anthropology! No — cooking!

Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett has called this period of exploration "emerging adulthood." But this crucial stage — which has stretched longer for Americans who now form their own households, marry and have children later — doesn't really apply to the poor. They cannot afford it.

This is the case for the poor black teens in Baltimore in "Coming of Age in the Other America," a new book by sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin. The researchers tracked the lives of 150 teens in Baltimore, who were born into derelict public housing projects and raised amid startling violence, as they were entering their 20s.

"All society sees is you're twenty-three and you should damn well have it together by now, you know what I'm sayin'?'" Terry, who does not yet have it together, tells the researchers (they've changed all of their subjects' names in the book).
But of course, society doesn't expect this of 23-year-old middle- and upper-class kids. They're often allowed time to figure out careers and bills, and they're cushioned when they don't. The young adults in the Baltimore study have no such breathing space: They have to support younger siblings when drug-addicted parents can't, or care for the babies they've already had, or earn their own way to escape violence. They aren't exploring their way into adulthood; they are lurching there, as fast as possible.

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/19/why-becoming-an-adult-means-something-very-different-when-youre-poor/

[Skittles]

1. I didn't have the luxury of that phase either

I was in the military at age 18

[Igel]

2. Don't know about what "society" thinks about upper- and middle-class 23-year-olds.

Not sure that the writer actually does, either.

I know that if you've just graduated it takes a year or two to sort things out. Get settled. It's a big change from your job being going to school and whatever you do at home--a lot of your self-discipline is imposed, lots of little deadlines, little free time--to having a job and a lot of free time in your own place.

If you graduate at 18, I'd expect things to have settled down by 20. If you graduate at 22, I'd expect things to have settled down by 24. If you go to law school and graduate at 25, it still can take a year or two. If you get a PhD in art history and can't graduate before you're in your mid 40s, then you get a few months (because time is short by that point).

A fair number of low SES kids I know are already fishing around and doing the job shuffle to sort out what they want to do. They're still high school seniors. There's no necessary link between race/ethnicity and this kind of shuffle, but it's what they expect of themselves. Most of them aren't forced into this, they want out of school and hate school. Many studies only look at poverty in one group, and it's easy to assume the study's conclusions are somehow race-specific; the problem may affect one race more than another, but often that's in terms of percentages and not absolute number of people.

As for the problems with poverty, they don't kick in at graduation. I know kids in high school helping to support their family. When they graduate, they'll still have to help support their family. The question is whether the family will consider the same level of support as adequate--after all, they've gotten by for years--or if they'll treat the kid as some sort of GULag prisoner and demand that he work full time for the collective. (I've also seen kids who turn 18 and loyally buckle under for their collective, and kids who turned 18 and withdrew from school and left home, bailing on their abusive collective.)