ADULTHOODBut youth ‘‘irresponsibility’’ and employer re-
luctance to offer desirable jobs to youthful recruits
are not universal in modern societies. Instead,
they derive from particular institutional arrange-
ments. In the United States, the absence of clear
channels of mobility from education to the occu-
pational sector, and youths’ lack of occupation-
specific educational credentials, fosters a prolonged
period of trial and instability in the early career
(Kerckhoff 1996). In contrast, the highly devel-
oped institution of apprenticeship in Germany
implies the full acceptance of young workers as
adults, and encourages employers to invest in their
human capital (Hamilton 1990, 1999; Mortimer
and Kruger forthcoming).
The onset of adulthood has thus been delayed
through historical time by the emergence of suc-
cessive preadult life stages. This historical progres-
sion of preadult phases refers to the normative,
legitimate pathways to adulthood. A highly prob-
lematic, but increasingly prevalent way station in
the transition is supervision by the criminal justice
system; indeed, it is estimated that a full ten per-
cent of U.S. males, aged twenty to twenty-nine, is in
jail, in prison, on parole, or on probation on any
one day (Halperin 1998).
Obstacles to ‘‘growing up’’ are sometimes pre-
sented when assuming adultlike statuses threatens
adult interests and values. The extension of re-
quired schooling was motivated, at least in part, by
a desire to curb competition for jobs with older
workers (Osterman 1980). ‘‘Warehousing’’ the
young in secondary and tertiary education has
reduced adolescent unemployment during times
of economic contraction; earlier movement out of
school into the workforce is promoted by econom-
ic expansion (Shanahan et al. 1998).
Societal wealth may also encourage postpone-
ment of adulthood and the extension of ‘‘youth-
ful’’ values and life styles to older ages. Japanese
young people, traditionally oriented to the extend-
ed family, obedience, educational achievement,
and hard work, seem to be becoming more rebel-
lious and interested in immediate enjoyment as
delayed gratification becomes more difficult to
sustain in a more affluent society (Connor and De
Vos 1989; White 1993).
Although age-related increases from birth
through the second decade of life—in strength,
cognitive capacity, and autonomy (Shanahan, this
volume)—are probably recognized in some form
in all human societies, the social construction of
the early life course clearly reflects societal diversi-
ty and institutional change. Processes of moderni-
zation, encompassing changes in education, the
labor force, and the emergence of the welfare
state, produce age standardization of the early life
course (Shanahan forthcoming). For example, the
social differentiation of children and adolescents
was less pronounced in the educational system in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America
than in the contemporary period (Graff 1995).
Secondary school students have become increas-
ingly homogeneous in age; this more pronounced
age grading promotes ‘‘adolescent’’ life styles and
orientations. Similarly, the extension of postsecondary
schooling promotes the perpetuation of ‘‘youth.’’
However, during the past century in the United
States the changes marking the transition have
taken place first in quicker, and then in more
lengthy, succession (Shanahan forthcoming; Modell
et al. 1976).As a result of technological and economic
change and increasing educational requirements
(Hogan and Mochizuki 1988; Arnett and Taber
1994; Cöté and Allahar 1994), as well as family
instability (Buchmann 1989), the entry to adult-
hood has been characterized as increasingly ex-
tended, diversified, individualized (Buchmann
1989; Shanahan forthcoming), ‘‘disorderly’’ (Rindfuss
et al. 1987), variable (Shanahan forthcoming), and
less well defined (Buchmann 1989). For example,
while the acquisition of full-time work is widely
considered to mark the transition to adulthood,
distinctions between ‘‘youth work’’ and ‘‘adult
work’’ blur as young people increasingly combine,
and alternate, student and occupational roles, in
various forms and levels of intensity through a
lengthy period of adolescence and youth (Mortimer
and Johnson 1998, 1999; Mortimer et al. 1999;
Morris and Bernhardt 1998; Arum and Hout 1998).
Markers of family formation likewise become less
clear as young people move in and out of cohabiting
and marital unions (Spain and Bianchi 1996).Orderly sequences of transition events have
become less common (Shanahan forthcoming).
For example, many youth return to their parental
homes after leaving for college or other destina-
tions (Cooney 1994). Divergence from normative