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There are kids, and then there are 'kids'
© Chicago Tribune (excerpt) Guess who's moving by the dozen into the two-bedroom apartment upstairs?
"When we all lived on the farm or as peasants in villages, you went straight from childhood to adulthood without a separate, limbo age period," said Reed Larson, a professor of human and community development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies adolescence. Frank Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, says it's not an exaggeration to claim the pre-adulthood period as a completely new stage of life. "In the past we might say [that] when adolescence ended, adulthood began, but that is no longer the case. We have a period which doesn't have a name," he said of the in-between stage. What tends to define this group, researchers say, is a lot of dating, hanging out, having multiple partners and using drugs and alcohol. It's a time of instability and excitement--and, yes, of being less mature.
By Ana Beatriz Cholo, Tribune staff reporter
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The idea of a period of "pre-adulthood" recalls the emergence of the concept of adolescence, which experts say did not exist until about 100 years ago, when industrialization slowed children's entry into adulthood.