In 1950, close to half of all women in the United States were married
for the first time by age 20 (and men a few years later). By 1975, the median
age (when half were married) was 21, and today it’s risen to about 25 (Set-
tersten, Furstenberg, and Rumbaut, 2005).
We’re starting families later, too. In 1970, the average age for women
at the birth of their first child was 21.4 in the United States (men weren’t
asked). In 2000, it was around 25. One of the reasons for the delay is
greater gender equality. Since 1970, the percentage of women graduating
from college has nearly doubled, and the number in the labor force has gone
up by nearly 40 percent (Arnett, 2004).
The age at first birth differs by race: 22.3 for African Americans, 25.9
for Whites, and over 30 for Asian Americans. Among Hispanic Americans,
the age ranges from 22 for Puerto Rican and Mexican women to 27 for
Cuban women (Centers for Disease Control, 2002). It also differs signifi-
cantly by state, from 22.5 in Mississippi to 27.8 in Massachusetts. Both of
these correlations probably reflect the lurking variable of socioeconomic
class: Well-educated, wealthy and middle-class women are more likely to
finish college or start their careers before they think about having children,
while poor and working-class women are likely to start having children in
their late teens or early twenties. We see the same pattern globally: In
wealthy countries, women put off starting their families for several years after ado-
lescence. The average age of a mother when she gives birth for the first time is 29 in
Switzerland. But in West Africa, 55 percent of women have children in their teens
(National Center for Health Statistics, 2006).
An extended period of education and training between childhood and adulthood
has been required since the Industrial Revolution, but even today, for about 80 per-
cent of the U.S. population, that training mostly ends at high school graduation,
around the age of 18. So why is settling down to jobs, houses, and life partners rarely
occurring at age 18 or even at age 22 for everyone anymore? The media have even
invented a new term, twixters,for people in their twenties, years past their high
school or college graduation but still culturally adolescent: living with their parents,
having fun, and trying to discover “what they want to do when they grow up.” (They
also call it “KIPPERS,” somewhat less positively: “KIPPERS” stands for “Kids in
Pockets, Eroding Retirement Savings.”)
Putting off all adult responsibilities may be a response to increased longevity:
If I’m going to live 20 years longer than my grandparents did, then maybe I have
20 more years to “grow up.” But it is also a response to the fluid nature of con-
temporary adulthood. Most people no longer select a career in their teens, find a
job shortly after high school or college, and stick with it for the next 50 years. They
change jobs every couple of years and switch careers three or four times in the
course of their lives, going back to school for more training between and during
each change; thus, “deciding on a career” is not a once-in-a-lifetime event restricted
to adolescents but a lifelong process. What used to be strictly adolescent concerns
now occupy people of every age.
Also, most people no longer go on lots of dates through high school and college,
decide on “the one,” and then marry and stay married for the rest of their lives. Of
first marriages, 43 percent end in divorce, and 75 percent of people who divorce go
on to remarry. Mate selection is not restricted to dances in the gym after high school
football games but, like getting a job, is a lifelong process. The milestones that once
spelled the entrance to adulthood, definitively and finally, now occur throughout life,
so it is little wonder that people feel like adolescents at age 30, 40, 50, or even as old
as 60. (Just watch Mick Jagger sometime.)
AGE AND IDENTITY 353J”Twixters” or “adultoles-
cents”: Young people today
take longer to make the tran-
sition from adolescent to
adult than ever before. “Thirty
is the new twenty.”