College students today celebrate 21st birthdays with an average of 12 drinks for men and nine for women, finds the most in-depth picture yet of the consequences of extreme partying.

The University of Texas-Austin research found 78% of students cited ill effects, including hangovers (54%). Of 44% who had blackouts, 22% found out later they had sex, and 22% got in a fight or argument. And 39% didn’t know how they got home.

Although the study focused on only one campus, researchers say the new level of “extreme drinking” goes way beyond “bingeing” ”” four or five drinks in one sitting. And it’s a phenomenon probably being repeated at schools across the country, researchers say. Studying 21st-birthday celebrations is a new area of research, and no national studies have been done, but studies on a handful of other campuses have found similar extremes.

Read it all.

It’s a rough road to manhood for young guys, who more than ever are finding themselves confounded and conflicted about what “masculinity” means.

Behavioral researchers say being a heterosexual male used to mean being macho, but guys today get mixed messages on all fronts as they navigate sex, drinking, friendships and the future.

“The social messages ”¦ about how to be a good person or a good guy vary quite widely,” says Glenn Good, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Joseph Hammer, 23, who is working on a master’s in counseling at Missouri, hears a lot of competing messages. “Your parents tell you things. Your friends tell you things. Your teachers tell you things. You see things on TV.”

Read it all.

One of the most stunning outcomes from the Barna survey was the moral pattern among adults under 25. The younger generation was more than twice as likely as all other adults to engage in behaviors considered morally inappropriate by traditional standards. Their choices made even the Baby Boomers – never regarded as a paragon of traditional morality – look like moral pillars in comparison.

For instance, two-thirds of the under-25 segment (64%) had used profanity in public, compared to just one out of five Boomers (19%). The younger group – known as Mosaics – was nine times more likely than were Boomers to have engaged in sex outside of marriage (38% vs. 4%), six times more likely to have lied (37% vs. 6%), almost three times more likely to have gotten drunk (25% vs. 9%) and to have gossiped (26% vs. 10%), and twice as likely as Boomers to have observed pornography (33% vs. 16%) and to have engaged in acts of retaliation (12% vs. 5%).

Read it all.

I am around more young people these days than at any point since I was young myself. Between my work…and my status as the parent of teenagers, I hear much of what young people have to say, both the things they say to adults and the things they say to each other. They say a lot ”” some of it scary, of course, but also much of it reassuring.

But here is something I never hear any of them say: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Only adults ask that question, and whenever I hear it, I cringe. I mean, this is mostly from people in their forties and fifties ”“ a group for whom you’d think the experience of deciding, re-thinking, re-deciding, and finally (sometimes) deciding not to decide, would be a fresh one….

My husband tells a story about when he was working as a reporter. He asked a question of Senator [George] Mitchell, during the Iran-Contra affair, and the Senator replied, “I disagree with the premise of your question. If you’d like to ask another, I’ll try to answer it.” Whenever I feel myself starting to ask a student what he or she wants to be, I remind myself that the premise of the question is wrong. It’s not what to be, it’s who.

–Alison M. Bennie

In “The Way We’ll Be,” the man whose organization has been uncommonly accurate in its predictions does not press his luck with political fortune-telling. Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are mentioned only three times each, since this book aspires to predicting more than short-term election trends. Mr. [John] Zogby instead concentrates on what he sees as tectonic shifts in American attitudes and argues that the importance of these changes has not been adequately understood.

The truly prescient political or marketing team, he argues, would be paying more attention to granular micro-precincts (i.e. “sports fans, pet owners, international travelers, early risers”); shopping destinations (Wal-Mart vs. Target); and secular spiritual attitudes than to the categories that mattered in the past. The historian charting the evolution of American values would pay more attention to Hurricane Katrina than to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

If the bad news is that Americans have lost faith in institutions they once trusted, like the government that so grievously failed Katrina victims, Mr. Zogby sees good news in the resilience of the young. He suggests that tomorrow’s American majority will be less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world. “At long last, cynicism bottoms out,” he predicts in one wildly optimistic moment.

Read it all.

Mr. Cosby’s appearance in the predominantly black neighborhood was to encourage residents to enroll in Baltimore City Community College. During a nearly hour-long speech, Mr. Cosby said it’s never too late for high school dropouts to improve.

“There’s no love out there,” Mr. Cosby said of the street life. “The only thing out there is how to write your entrance exam to jail. We’ve got to teach. The church is open. Go on in.”

Mr. Cosby has been the source of controversy when he has addressed mostly black audiences. His criticisms of men fathering children out of wedlock have been called divisive. He spent most of his Baltimore speech, however, imploring his audience to seek self-improvement and to build pride within their community.

Young people of St. Ambrose said Mr. Cosby’s message of hope at St. Ambrose could be a catalyst for change.

“It means a lot for someone that popular,” said Maulana Waters, 15, “to come out and speak to regular people like us.”

Read it all.

A very powerful story–watch it all.

“As of 2008,” the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in “The Dumbest Generation,” “the intellectual future of the United States looks dim.”

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, “never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater,” writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize — they’ve actually made us dumber.

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. “Social life is a powerful temptation,” Bauerlein explains, “and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out.”

Read it all.

First it was drinking. Then it was cell phones. Now text-messaging is the latest behind-the-wheel activity lawmakers are trying to curb.

“All of my friends do it,” says Sonalie Patel, 17, who lives in Elk Grove Village, Ill., and admits that she too occasionally sends texts despite a ban on cell phone use for drivers under 19 and adults with learners permits. “It’s like an epidemic.”

Indeed, a Nationwide Insurance survey found that 18% of cell phone owners text and drive and that drivers between the ages of 16 and 30 are the most frequent texters. Young adults have even posted videos of themselves texting while driving on YouTube, and nearly 600 people have joined a Facebook group called “I Text Message People While Driving And I Haven’t Crashed Yet!”

Read it all.

Abandoning grueling freeway commutes and the ennui of San Fernando Valley suburbs, Mike Boseman recently found residential refuge in this Southern California city. His apartment building straddles a light-rail line, which the 25-year-old insurance broker rides to and from work in Los Angeles.

Richard Wells is more than a generation older but was similarly attracted to the Pasadena apartment building. The British-born scientist retains what he calls a European preference for public transportation despite his nearly 30 years in California. Plus, he said, the building’s location means, “I can walk to a hundred restaurants, the Pasadena symphony and movie theaters.”

Messrs. Boseman and Wells embody trends that are dovetailing to potentially reshape a half-century-long pattern of how and where Americans live: The driveable suburb — that bedrock of post-World War II society — is for many a mile too far.

In recent years, a generation of young people, called the millennials, born between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, has combined with baby boomers to rekindle demand for urban living. Today, the subprime-mortgage crisis and $4-a-gallon gasoline are delivering further gut punches by blighting remote subdivisions nationwide and rendering long commutes untenable for middle-class Americans.

Read it all.

“I think we could have done better,” shrugged computer science major Kevin Bombino. He says Rowling lacks the gravitas a Harvard commencement speaker should have.

“You know, we’re Harvard. We’re like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to ”¦ we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we’re settling here.”

Rowling was chosen by Harvard’s alumni. University President Drew Gilpin Faust applauded her selection, saying, “No one in our time has done more to inspire young people to ”¦ read.”

Rowling follows a long line of heavies who’ve spoken at Harvard’s commencement. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used the platform to detail his “Marshall Plan” to rebuild Europe after World War II.

Since then, speakers have included such luminaries as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, other heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, and scholars.

“It’s definitely the ‘A’ list, and I wouldn’t ever associate J.K. Rowling with the people on that list,” says senior Andy Vaz.

Read or listen to it all.

The credit crunch has driven dozens of lenders out of the student loan market. But a number of new websites are trying to sidestep the traditional players, facilitating loans between students and anonymous investors or even friends and family members.

The latest start-up player in the so-called “peer-to-peer” student lending market, GreenNote, marks its official launch Wednesday. The timing is intended to attract interest as students piece together financial aid over the summer.

The field is still fairly small but hoping for sharp seasonal increases. Fynanz, a competitor that matches up students anonymously with investors, said it’s seen a big uptick this week, with applications for about $180,000 in loans arriving in just the last three days.

Read it all.

Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach.

The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign.

The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.

“There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children,” said Valerie Huber, the group’s executive director.

Read the whole article.

An interesting post here on: why am I single?

At age 30, Bryan Short has, by any standard, achieved professional success since graduating from Boston College and law school at the College of William and Mary. Yet despite his job as a Washington mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, he’s nowhere near as financially secure as he expected to be by now.

He and his wife own one car and rent a 500-square-foot studio apartment. More than one-third of his take-home pay is gobbled up by repayment of college and law-school debt. Children are unaffordable right now. And retirement savings? They’ve barely begun.

“Despite being what most would consider clearly upper-middle class, highly educated and almost assuredly on no one’s pity party list, I can assure you we live an extremely modest life,” says Short, whose wife, Regina, is pursuing an MBA at Johns Hopkins University.

For years, experts have warned that too many of the USA’s 79 million baby boomers aren’t financially ready for their coming retirements. Yet, if the boomers have had it hard, it’s nothing compared with those next in line: Generation X ”” people such as the Shorts…

Read it all from USA Today.

The recent tragic death of Stephanie Kuleba, an 18-year-old high school cheerleader who died as a result of complications during a breast augmentation surgery, brought our attention to the pursuit of a more “ideal” body amongst teenagers. In fact, search data confirms this phenomenon. One of the most popular sites visited from the search term “plastic surgery” is the official site of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (www.plasticsurgery.org). Over 25% of visitors to the site (the largest segment) fell within the 18- to 24-year-old demographic ”” that’s up from 19.6% two years ago.

Plastic surgery has become an American obsession. Checking other markets that Hitwise has data on, such as the U.K. and Australia, the 18- to 24-year-old fascination with plastic surgery is a decidedly U.S. phenomenon.

Looking at other health related sites visited by 18- t 24-year-olds, reveals just how obsessed this age group is with appearance. Unlike their older counterparts who visit sites related to diseases and keeping healthy, younger Internet users flock to sites that dwell on personal appearance, such as those focused on bodybuilding, weight loss and skincare. And definitely plastic surgery.

Read it all.

Police have arrested 96 people ”“ 75 of them students ”“ in the largest campus drug bust in the country at San Diego State University, law enforcement sources say.

Police picked up the individuals for charges stemming from possession and sales of cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and other drugs, which Damon Mosler, chief of narcotics for the San Diego District Attorney’s Office, estimated was worth approximately $100,000.

In addition to criminal charges, SDSU students arrested were immediately suspended from the university and evicted from all campus-managed housing, said the president of the university, Stephen Weber.

Authorities say among those arrested was a student who was a criminal justice major and was found with 500 grams of cocaine and two guns. Another suspect worked as an employee of the campus police and was one month away from graduating with a masters degree in Homeland Security.

Read it all.

Jason Liebrecht used to write about his motorcycle adventures on his blog. But since early this month, the 36-year-old San Diego computer software engineer’s daily musings have been about a less thrilling new experience: unemployment.

“Do I find a job, or do I head to Central and South America on the motorcycle?” he wrote on Day 4. By Day 7, he had become more realistic: “So far in the last week I’ve made $1,245 off of EBay sales. Mostly stuff I wasn’t using, or don’t need much. Nice way to clean the house up!”

After selling some stock and applying for unemployment, Liebrecht figures he can pay his $2,300-a-month mortgage and other bills for just two months. When his company health insurance runs out in a few weeks, he’ll go uncovered because he can’t afford the premiums.

“You have to just hope you land on your feet,” Liebrecht said in an interview.

People everywhere are coping with rising credit card balances, falling home values and layoffs. But such worries are particularly jarring for a younger slice of the workforce that has known little but long-term financial prosperity and optimism.

Read it all.

When a fellow student at Rutgers University urged Didi Onejeme to try Philosophy 101 two years ago, Ms. Onejeme, who was a pre-med sophomore, dismissed it as “frou-frou.”

“People sitting under trees and talking about stupid stuff ”” I mean, who cares?” Ms. Onejeme recalled thinking at the time.

But Ms. Onejeme, now a senior applying to law school, ended up changing her major to philosophy, which she thinks has armed her with the skills to be successful. “My mother was like, what are you going to do with that?” said Ms. Onejeme, 22. “She wanted me to be a pharmacy major, but I persuaded her with my argumentative skills.”

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.

Rutgers, which has long had a top-ranked philosophy department, is one of a number of universities where the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is ballooning; there are 100 in this year’s graduating class, up from 50 in 2002, even as overall enrollment on the main campus has declined by 4 percent.

Read it all.

At 29, Anderson is a young man, but the congregation facing him is even younger.

The pews at Praxis Church in Tempe are filled with people in their early 20s who look like they should be gathering at a college coffeehouse or bar.

Anderson stands before them as a distinct choice at a time of significant shifts in the religious landscape in this country.

Praxis – which means the practical application of a belief system – represents a rigorous dogma that challenges its congregation to accept Christ and to sin no more. Each verse of the Bible is taught as the inspired and infallible word of God.

Offering a clear spiritual voice has never been more important for churches than it is today because people are more willing than ever to shop for one that fits their religious needs.

Read it all.

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You have to think all of these things that we think.” They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already. At her public high school, everyone, “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

And then Fredell arrived at Harvard. Sitting in a Cambridge restaurant not long ago, she told me that people back home called it “godless, liberal Harvard.” Some discouraged her from going, but Fredell went anyway, arriving in the fall of 2005. She wanted to study government, she said, maybe become a lawyer, and she knew that “people take you more seriously as a Harvard student.”

From the start, she told me, she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas. There were so many different kinds of people at Harvard, most of them trying to change the world, and everyone trying to figure out what they thought of everyone else. “Harvard really puts pressure on you to define who you are,” Fredell said, and she loved everything about Harvard, except the sex.

Sex, as she put it, was not even “anything I’d ever thought about” when, as a freshman, she was educated in safe-sex practices. What she was told was the sort of thing found in a Harvard pamphlet called “Empowering You”: “put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus. . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex.”

Fredell began to understand she was in “a culture that says sex is totally O.K.” When a new boyfriend came to her, expressing desire, she managed to “stick to my guns,” she said, but there were “uncouth and socially inept” men, as she considered them, all around, and observing the rituals of her new classmates, Fredell couldn’t help being alarmed. “The hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing,” she said. “It’s shocking! It’s everywhere!”

Read it all.

It was late on a rainy fall day, and a college freshman named Rey was showing me the new tattoo on his arm. It commemorated his 500-mile hike through Europe the previous summer, which happened also to be, he said, the last time he was happy. We sat together for a while in his room talking, his tattoo of a piece with his spiky brown hair, oversize tribal earrings and very baggy jeans. He showed me a photo of himself and his girlfriend kissing, pointed out his small drum kit, a bass guitar that lay next to his rumpled clothes and towels and empty bottles of green tea, one full of dried flowers, and the ink self-portraits and drawings of nudes that he had tacked to the walls. Thick jasmine incense competed with his cigarette smoke. He changed the music on his laptop with the melancholy, slightly startled air of a college boy on his own for the first time.

Rey’s story, though, had some unusual dimensions. The elite college he began attending last year in New York City, with its academically competitive, fresh-faced students, happened to be a women’s school, Barnard. That’s because when Rey first entered the freshman class, he was a woman.

Read it all.

I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Religions seem ancient, and many are. But they all began somewhere, and a considerable number began in the USA. The most successful new religious movements of the 19th and 20th centuries ”” Mormonism and Scientology ”” were both “made in America.” And according to J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, Americans continue to pump out new religions at a rate of about 40 to 50 per year.

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best. This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates “winners” and “losers” in America’s freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

The new religious concoctions my students stir up might seem to mirror the diversity of American religion itself. Students tantalize one another with a religion (Dessertism) that preaches the stomach as the way to the soul, another (The Congregation of Wisdom) that honors Jeopardy! phenom Ken Jennings as its patron saint, and yet another (Exetazo) dedicated to sorting out the pluses and minuses of all the other religions so you can find a faith tailored to your own unique personality.

What strikes me most about my students’ religions, however, is how similar they are…

Read it all.

What won’t I be doing?

I will not be sitting in front of the 6:30 network news.

More importantly, neither will any of the college students in my classes.

They are the news consumers of the future and the evening news has no place in their lives. I teach Politics and Media with reading assignments from the most widely used textbook in the field, but the students don’t know what to make of it. To them, it reads like ancient history. The author writes as if the world still looked up to news anchors. She refers familiarly and respectfully to Brian Williams and Katie Couric in a tone that assumes her readers – the students – also worship them.

Wrong. The students worship Jon Stewart. They have never watched the 6:30 news, not even once. They have never watched the local 5:00 news shows either. I have to actually assign students to watch the local news in order to get the students to watch those shows, so they will know what their textbooks are talking about. I might as well have asked them to go to a museum.

My anecdotal evidence is supported by research. In a recent study, Thomas Patterson from Harvard found that young people ”“ surprise! ”“ don’t tune into Katie or any other traditional news anchors. They don’t have the same daily news habit that their parents had.

Read it all.

New Year’s Eve tends to be the day of the year with the most binge drinking (based on drunken driving fatalities), followed closely by Super Bowl Sunday. Likewise, colleges have come to expect that the most alcohol-filled day of their students’ lives is their 21st birthday. So, some words of caution for those who continue to binge and even for those who have stopped: just as the news is not so great for former cigarette smokers, there is equally bad news for recovering binge-drinkers who have achieved a sobriety that has lasted years. The more we have binged ”” and the younger we have started to binge ”” the more we experience significant, though often subtle, effects on the brain and cognition.

Much of the evidence for the impact of frequent binge-drinking comes from some simple but elegant studies done on lab rats by Fulton T. Crews and his former student Jennifer Obernier. Dr. Crews, the director of the University of North Carolina Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, and Dr. Obernier have shown that after a longstanding abstinence following heavy binge-drinking, adult rats can learn effectively ”” but they cannot relearn.

When put into a tub of water and forced to continue swimming until they find a platform on which to stand, the sober former binge-drinking rats and the normal control rats (who had never been exposed to alcohol) learned how to find the platform equally well. But when the experimenters abruptly moved the platform, the two groups of rats had remarkably different performances. The rats without previous exposure to alcohol, after some brief circling, were able to find the new location. The former binge-drinking rats, however, were unable to find the new platform; they became confused and kept circling the site of the old platform.

This circling occurs, Dr. Crews says, because the former binge-drinking rats continued to show neurotoxicity in the hippocampus long after (in rat years) becoming sober. On a microscopic level, Dr. Crews has shown that heavy binge-drinking in rats diminishes the genesis of nerve cells, shrinks the development of the branchlike connections between brain cells and contributes to neuronal cell death. The binges activate an inflammatory response in rat brains rather than a pure regrowth of normal neuronal cells. Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making.

Read it all.

There are no pews at Tikkun Leil Shabbat, no rabbis, no one with children or gray hair.

Instead, one rainy Friday night, the young worshipers sat in concentric circles in the basement of an office building, damp stragglers four deep against the walls. In the middle, Megan Brudney and Rob Levy played guitar, drums and sang, leading about 120 people through the full Shabbat liturgy in Hebrew.

Without a building and budget, Tikkun Leil Shabbat is one of the independent prayer groups, or minyanim, that Jews in their 20s and 30s have organized in the last five years in at least 27 cities around the country. They are challenging traditional Jewish notions of prayer, community and identity.

Read it all.

Too few people know about this wonderful ministry. They held their recent summit in South Carolina and kindly asked me to preach. I went early and had dinner with them and listened to their first session and was completely blown away by the deidcation, spiritual seriousness, and energy of these young leaders. We do not deserve them, they shouldn’t be there, but God is raising them up any way–KSH.

Morley Safer reports on the new generation of “millennials.” They are in their late teens to early twenties and could be ill prepared for a demanding workplace.

Watch it all.

These four social transformations together have helped dramatically to alter the experience of American life between the ages of 18 and 30. Studies agree that the transition to adulthood today is more complex, disjointed, and confusing than it was in past decades. The steps through and to schooling, first real job, marriage, and parenthood are simply less well organized and coherent today than they were in generations past. At the same time, these years are marked by an historically unparalleled freedom to roam, experiment, learn (or not), move on, and try again.

What has emerged from this new situation has been variously labeled “extended adolescence,” “youthhood,” “adultolescence,” “young adulthood,” the “twenty-somethings,” and “emerging adulthood.” I find persuasive Jeffrey Arnett’s argument that, of all of these labels, “emerging adulthood” is the most appropriate””because rather than viewing these years as simply the last hurrah of adolescence or an early stage of real adulthood, it recognizes the unique characteristics of this phase of life. These, according to Arnett in Emerging Adulthood, mark this stage as one of intense (1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) focus on self, (4) feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between, and (5) sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. These, of course, are also often accompanied by big doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, and disappointment. Many popular television shows of the last two decades””Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson’s Creek, Seinfeld, and Friends, for example””have taken as their point of departure the character and challenges of this new, in-between stage of life. I think it all signifies something big and serious.

Note that some of the statistics about emerging adulthood today are not historically unique. For example, young Americans in the 19th and very early 20th century, when society was more rural and agricultural, also married later in life than they did in the 1950s. Nevertheless, changes in the larger culture and social order in late 20th-century America make the experience of emerging adulthood today very different from the young adulthood of a century ago.

Read it all.