The late, great linguist, Michel Thomas, whose method of teaching languages built on his students’ intuitive knowledge of their native tongues, was fond of saying, ‘What you understand, you know; and what you know, you don’t forget’. In other words, when we really understand something, there is no need to rehearse it or indeed to think very deeply about it at all. The same is true of what we know of human relationships. We do not need to study ‘loving’ to fall in love, or ‘friending’ to be a friend. We might reflect on our relationships from time to time, but we don’t need to be told how to do them. We are simply lovers or friends, husbands or wives, sons or daughters.
This is why the recent invention of the verb ‘to adult’, in 2008, should set off alarm bells. When the universal and authentic human experience of adulthood suddenly requires its very own verb, or worse, detailed instructions (adulting classes are springing up around the US), it shows that we no longer understand adulthood except as performance.
Kelly Williams Brown, author of Adulting: How to Become a Grownup in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, gives voice to this sense of alienation when she writes ‘adult isn’t something you are, it’s something you do. You are a grown-ass man or grown-ass woman and you can act like it even if you don’t feel like it on the inside.’ But in a healthy society, an adult is something that you are. It doesn’t need to be broken down into four steps, let alone 468, because the actuality of adulthood is knitted into the fabric of people’s lives. They experience it and internalise it through the behaviour of the adults around them and through the clear distinctions drawn between adults and children. Their experiences prepare them one day to attain the status of a fully fledged, self-determining, responsible adult and, what’s more, it is something they want to achieve.
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This is no longer the case today. American society has grown ambivalent about adulthood. It is not just that some of the traditional milestones such as a fulltime job or home ownership are harder to realise. For many young adults, these milestones are less desirable. The adult commitments of marriage and children are increasingly regarded as a burdensome imposition, synonymous with conformity and unwelcome obligation. Indeed, for many, coming of age is understood as the unfettered pursuit of lifestyle – that is, the organisation of life around a set of chosen activities and commitments aimed at personal fulfillment or becoming one’s best self.
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Ben Sasse’s new book, The Vanishing American Adult, looks at the state of adulthood in the US, and asks how and why we are failing to socialise a new generation into adults. Sasse, who is a former college president and the junior Republican Senator from the state of Nebraska, argues that the tendency of young Americans to linger in a perpetual state of adolescence has serious implications for them and for the health of democracy.
The tendency of young Americans to linger in a perpetual state of adolescence has serious implications for them and for the health of democracy
Unlike other authors writing about childrearing, however, Sasse does not offer parenting advice as such, and though he is critical of what coming of age has come to mean, this is no lurid exposé of the failings of young people. Perhaps most unusually, he does not advocate policy solutions. This is a good thing. Politicising the way that people raise their children or pitting one generation against another is unhelpful and potentially harmful. Millennial bashing or its opposite, the flippant appeals to the older generation to hurry up and die off, are ugly and dehumanising responses to serious political and social concerns.
Instead, Sasse focuses on the informal, ongoing interchange between children, their parents, teachers and other adults, which sets the scene for young people’s transition to the adult world. In other words, how we come to understand so that we know. The way this usually works is that children look to adults to guide them. Adults show them how the world works and how to distinguish right from wrong until they can do it for themselves. The
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authority of adults over kids is natural at first because young children are entirely dependent on them, but it soon develops into something much richer: a shared understanding of morality, fairness, and cultural norms. Ideally, parents and other adults exercise collective control over the young until they are able to control themselves and earn their place in the grownup world. It is these pre-political relationships that lay the ground for politics and wider social life.
The problem we have today is that these intergenerational relationships have been disrupted, by the breakdown of the institutions of private life (the family, church etc) and by their replacement with new institutions – schools, for example, that segregate the young into age-specific groups and isolate them from the influence of all but school and their equally inexperienced peers. These new institutions work to undermine parental authority and make it much more difficult for adults to socialise the rising generation. As a result, significant numbers of young people lack the knowledge, the resilience or the desire to run society, a point Sasse illustrates with multiple, disturbing examples throughout The Vanishing American Adult. But if there is one area that concerns him more than others, it is the impact of perpetual adolescence on democracy. The problem is not simply that young adults are not up to the task of running society; it’s also that their beliefs about the world and themselves are fundamentally at odds with the basic tenets of the American republic. There are signs that a significant section of young adults today do not value or necessarily understand the freedoms upon which previous generations were willing to stand or fall.
