Y2K Survivor

How do you know when you are all growed up?  Does it involve a belief or lack of belief in Santa clause, the Tooth Fairy, The Easter Bunny or Kind Republicans?  Is it th ability to earn your own income and have your own home (either rented apartment, or home ownership) or is it more intrinsic like adopting a code of life or your own set of morals?

When I was a kid I remember feeling very uneasy about the concept of a Bar Mitzvah.  The very idea that one day you go to sleep thinking about Captain America and Loni Anderson and the next day you are a man simply because you became 13 years old scared the crap out of me, mainly because I knew I was not mature enough to handle the responsibility that came with being an adult.  Then I felt guilt over the obvious incompetence of not measuring up to be a man at the age of 13, and not only was I not Jewish, at that age I didn't even know any Jews in my small rural Oklahoma hometown.

Us Okies, we children of poverty, we hear stories all our lives of our parents and roles models and how they struggled and suffered and became adults way too early.  They tell us these tales with the pride of people that survive horrible ordeals.  And the next generation feels that same experience is required to be a full growed up adult.

The odd thing is there was this recent survey that asked both kids and parents when thy feel like adults.  As you would guess most parents did not feel their kids aged 18-25 were mature enough to be considered adults.  What shocked researchers is that the kids aged 18-25 agreed with the parents!

And you know, there was a wealth of life experience involved between the ages of 18 and 25, but I never seriously considered myself an adult until after that time frame.  Researchers are suggesting it is because people live longer, which I think is crap.  I have a cousin in Oklahoma city who told me it took him nine or ten years to deprogram the damage public education did to his brain.  After that point he was able to go on in life and achive a level of success. 

I have several studies that will claim it is media influence that tells kids that as young adults they are duty bound to drink all the can hold, have sex all they can stand and enjoy the fleeting stage of youth.  It seem like an awful lot of influence for a simple 30 second Bud Light commercial, only it isn't a single commercial, it's movies and TV and all of the commercials and print ads and People Magazine showing Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan flashing their bare crotch to photographers.  It's society tells us that from the day you graduate high school til you are well out of college you should be an irresponsible drunken loser.  Then make your life a success story, if you can.

So is it all that odd that something like 85% of the parents and 85% of the kids agree that between the ages of 18-25 they are held to adult standards but those kids are NOT all growed up!  In fact the researchers are now calling it a newly identified stage of life called "Emerging Adults."  So the next question is, what are the implications?  Should we raise the drinking age?  Raise the age for legal property ownership?  Make it illegal for kids under the age of 25 to join the military?  What dos it mean when we realize our young adults are really just big kids that don't even try to act like adults?