The Transit Lounge

Daniel Donahoo 

I moved out of home when I was 21. It felt good. I saw it as the final cutting of that invisible parental rope that is reeled in and out across the teenage years, as parents attempt to assert some control and influence over the emotional and spiritual development of their children.

Of course, despite having left the nest, that invisible rope was still very much there. I just chose to ignore it. A couple of years later, I found myself following it back home when I discovered I was going to be a dad — and once again I would intertwine my life with that of my parents and extended family. We haven’t looked back.

Social commentators say young people are staying at home well into their 20s these days. I haven’t met many of them, to be honest. But maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. They say there’s something wrong with that. Young people are somehow not becoming fully adult, because they refuse to fly from the nest. I’ve heard that 30 is the new 21.

Well, I turn 30 this year and find myself with the full suite of responsibilities: a loving partner, a pair of kids, and a mortgage to boot. It certainly makes me feel responsible. But I’m not so sure I’m any more grown up than any twentysomething. In fact, if I didn’t have these things and people questioned my capacity to engage with the adult world, I’d probably be offended.

In the debates about generations, there’s a lot of anxiety about the twentysomethings of today not growing up. We’ve heard about the ‘Peter Pan’ syndrome, adultescents and a myriad of strange, hybrid words used to describe those entering adulthood in a way many pundits claim to think is less than desirable. But desirable compared to what? Exactly how are young people supposed to enter adulthood in the 21st century?

The twentysomethings of today are entering the adult world with HECS debts bigger than a house deposit, where they must negotiate an uncertain industrial relations environment. Housing prices for first-time buyers are growing increasingly out of reach, and they’re surrounded by messages and images indicating that retaining one’s youth is compulsory and ageing is to be avoided.

In my book, Idolising Children, I suggested that young people are following a less traditional path into adulthood because we live in a society so obsessed with childhood and youth. There is little encouragement for twentysomethings to pursue the traditional trappings of adulthood. A mortgage and kids are too expensive, a lifetime partner seems an unlikely catch in our Western sea of divorces and plenty of other fish; where sexuality is fluid, fast and furious. We are all surrounded by a culture of younger-looking skin. Sixty is the new 50, 40 is the new 30, and whatever skin cream, surgery or consumer goods we want are available to make youth eternal for those of us leaving it, losing it or just loving the first-time feel of it. 

Is it any wonder young people are happy not to take on the responsibility of family and mortgages? Home ownership will only ever be the Great Australian Dream for many young people. They’ve seen the marriages of their own parents and many of their friends end in divorce. Is a bit of cynicism about love and the traditions of marriage and mortgage reasonable given the divorce rates of the last quarter century?

Kate Crawford, academic and author of Adult Themes, shines a new and convincing perspective on the generational debates. She argues that the world has changed: and so has what it means to grow up and be an adult. Children remain in the education system longer than ever, but our traditional views mean we perceive young people staying longer in the family home longer as a negative, rather than a positive.

For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of having children was rekindling my relationship with my parents, and establishing a new way of relating to them. In order for me to do this, I had to leave home and then return with a new context for our relationship. But by staying at home longer, twentysomethings across Australia are forging new adult relationships anyway, and helping reform the way households operate. Whether they’re saving up for a home deposit or simply staying at home because share-houses don’t appeal, they’re building intergenerational relationships in new ways. This isn’t a bad thing.

It’s too easy to malign an entire generation as materialistic, lacking heart, political conviction or direction, and sponging off their parents. We live in a different world and can’t expect young people to simply follow in the footsteps of their parents. Those footsteps — and the path they trod — vanished years ago.
 
At the recent Sydney Writer’s Festival, I led a panel discussion on generational issues with Barry Jones, Kate Crawford and Tom Dawkins of Vibewire, a youth-led non-profit media and arts organisation. All three agreed that our obsession with trying to find differences between generations was really sweating the small stuff.

The big issues of wealth distribution, climate change and working out relationships belong not to one particular generation — but to all of them. Thirty isn’t the new 21. It’s just a different kind of 30. And whether you’re 16 or 76, we all need to let the nitpicking go, roll up our sleeves and get stuck into living life.

 Daniel Donahoo is an OzProspect fellow and author of “Idolising Children”. http://www.danieldonahoo.com.

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