Coming of Age in America:The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century

摘要

Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-first Century offers an important new contribution to the growing literature on transitions to adulthood, which has emerged out of the MacArthur Research Network on the Transition to Adulthood (Settersten et al., 2005). Drawing on a rich set of interviews and survey data across four US cities, it delves beneath broad cultural anxieties about youth and young adulthood to explore how economic insecurity and increased educational requirements have created a more prolonged, and sometimes rocky, transition to adulthood, changing young people's experiences and understandings of coming of age. It offers a welcome focus on how young people themselves understand their own lives, finding that young adults are forging new cultural concepts of adulthood and are surprisingly optimistic about their own meandering paths.