A New Adulthood

Abstract

This chapter takes a critical lens to the field of youth transitions. The authors argue that the concept of youth as a period of transition has tended to ossify around school-to-work trajectories, obscuring the significance of other life spheres, such as leisure, friendship, and culture. Although youth transitions scholars can, and indeed are, beginning to account for a wider variety of transitions and do attempt to interrogate the impact of class, gender, and race on transition outcomes, the concept of transitions to adulthood underestimates the historically specific nature of youth, and adulthood, and is ill-suited to identifying the life course effects of youth experience. The authors draw on examples from their longitudinal research on two generations of young Australians to introduce a social generational framework that highlights the changing nature of youth and adulthood, as the stalwarts of transition patterns (education into work) are disrupted by trends toward lifelong learning and precarious work. The current generation of young Australians, like their counterparts in many other countries, have to navigate new transition regimes that involve a considerable investment of time and money in education. Yet globally competitive labor markets mean that the pay-off for education is often difficult to attain. These conditions, the authors argue, create a “new adulthood,” which is an outcome of a generational accommodation to the changing rules of the game of transition from education to work. They use this concept to move debate beyond claims that youth is simply an extended transition before adult status is reached.