Rethinking Adulthood

Graduate students are perennial students, spending more years in school than they care to count. Often asked when they're going to finish, get a real job, and grow up, most graduate students are seen as having an extended adolescence. In fact, I recall that when I was a doctoral student in developmental psychology, the running joke was that adolescence ends at 30 (developmental humor!). Turns out that we were right on the mark. This article from the New York Times describes the new popularity of 30th birthday parties, celebrations for the once stigmatized age. It seems that 30 is the new 21!

The meaning of age is changing -- the twenties are a period of extended personal and professional development, what adolescence once was. It's not just a social phenomenon, either. Developmental psychologists now argue that there is something between adolescence and adulthood, called emerging adulthood, that represents the transition from teenager to independent, autonomous, and stable adult. And this is good news for graduate students who now have a new way to address all those questions from well-meaning but uninformed relatives.