Delayed marriage and the lengthening path to adulthood
Those faithful followers of the College and Marriage post may also be interested in this article.
by Carolyn Moynihan
It’s not exactly news, but a report from Princeton University and the Brookings Institution highlights the well-established trend of “delayed adulthood” as people in their twenties prolong their education and fail to reach the milestones of marriage and parenthood.
Actually, this could be more a delay in financial and social independence than in an adult attitude to life: a twenty-something student or worker can be very responsible without having married or while still living in the family home. However, delayed economic independence and family formation have consequences not only for individuals and their families but for the whole of society, as research by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood shows.
At family level there is an increased economic burden on the parents of “emerging adults”. In the United States, people between the ages of 18 and 34 received an average of $38,000 in cash and two years’ worth of full-time labour from their parents, or about 10 per cent of their income. This seems to be true across the socio-economic spectrum and has shifted spending away from children in their teens to those in their twenties. It increases stress on middle-class and poor families, and leaves an unknown number of less well-off youth in difficulties, says the Transitions study leader, Frank F Furstenberg, in a report released by Princeton and Brookings:
When families cannot help out, youth are often left to flounder on their own. There is a pressing need for publicly provided health care, education and training, and social services for youth whose families cannot support them as they navigate the passage to economic self-sufficiency.
But society is already struggling to meet the dependency needs of seniors, and cutting back at that level may be counter-productive, Furstenberg continues:
At a societal level, the United States and the rest of the developed world face a growing policy dilemma: the need to invest in children and youth while continuing to support the economic, health, and social needs of a growing population aged sixty-five and older. The dilemma has been largely managed so far by family exchange from the elderly to the young. The current public system of support for seniors is underfinanced, however, and many observers are talking about the need to reduce Social Security benefits to preserve the system. Cutting back on those benefits, though, may have unforeseen consequences for the ability of parents to invest in their young adult children. With less support from their parents, the middle generation may be required to cut back on their support for their own children to help out their parents. Low-income families, especially, may face competing demands from elderly parents and their young adult offspring.
This in turn could make young adults even less willing to form families of their own and ultimately impact on the workforce and social security:
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What do we expect?
Once government mandated social security and medicare transfer payments from young to old began to have real impact on the resources of both the young and the old, the “free rider” principle created economic winners of those who, because of advanced birth control methods and abortion, chose not to have children. These “economic winners” reap the benefits of other people’s economic investments in their own children since those children transfer “social security” payments not only to their own parents but also to the non-parents.
Europe is farther along in this societal reformation than we are in the US since their birth rate is barely above 1 per woman while everyone tries to be a free rider. European post- adolescents have been living at home for years.
In the past, particularly in the US, it has been assumed that the next generation would have better lives than their elders. Some young adults took this assumption on faith and had families believing that things would work themselves out. Because of our national profligacy for five and more decades the more rational ones, those with fewer children, have done and will do better economically. When younger generations appreciate this situation the downward spiral in births per woman will be reinforced perhaps even to European levels.
Likewise the young, rationally, will attempt to extend adolesence and dependency for as long as possible. What is their incentive not to? Seeing the fiscal mess that they will have to clean up, the next generation may rationally have come to believe that in their 20′s they will be more affluent than at any other time in their lives. We’ve made the world, they are just playing the game under the rules we gave them.
……….So, this is an argument for socialism. Cool.