• The late teen years and early 20s are probably the best time to explore.
• Anthony Burrow, an assistant professor of human development at Cornell University, studies the question of whether young adults feel like they have a purpose in life.
• In a study, commitment to a purpose ...

Getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids-for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and '60s, people did not become adults in any kind of predictable way.

And yet these are still the venerated markers of adulthood today, and when people take t...

Social constructs have real consequences: they determine who is legally responsible for their actions and who is not, what roles people are allowed to assume in society, how people view each other, and how they view themselves.

There is either no answer, or a variety of complex and multifac...

• Emerging adulthood is a vague, transitory time between adolescence and true adulthood.
• It's so vague that sometimes 25 is the upper boundary, and sometimes 29.
• While adolescence clearly ends at 18, when people typically leave high school and their parents' homes, and are lega...

• Before World War II, it was unusual for the young to achieve the markers of full adult status before their mid- or late twenties.
• The golden age of easy adulthood did not last long.
• Starting in the 1960s, the marriage age began to rise again and secondary education became mor...

• There's no one path to adulthood
• Circumstances sometimes thrust people into adult roles before they're ready
• Adulthood's responsibilities can definitely be thrust upon you, and if the world is treating someone as an adult before they feel like one, that can be challenging