Cusp

Twentysomethings on the brink of adulthood

by Robin Marantz Henig

Marry Young? That's What This Young Bride Suggests

Like Julia Shaw, the twentysomething author of a Slate article published in April, I married young -- a lot younger than my peers. I was 19 years old and a new college graduate when I married Jeff, my college boyfriend, who was one month shy of 22. It seems so young today. In truth, it seemed young even then. And now we're about to celebrate our 40th anniversary. Read More

A Mother-Daughter Story Stitched Into a Quilt

I made the bed the other day in my younger daughter Samantha’s old room with a quilt I pieced together by hand. The quilt wasn’t supposed to be here in my apartment, dressing up Sam’s girlhood bed. It was supposed to be with Sam, in her grownup home. But things took a different turn than I’d anticipated. Read More

Work-Life Balance and the "Good-Enough" Life

Elsa Walsh was 12 years older than I was when she had her baby, and a lot further along in her journalism career—a staff writer for The New Yorker—than I ever was going to be. But she's like me in one way: her thoughts about all the hoopla that surrounds the current round of books and articles about whether women can or can't have it all. Read More

When a Magazine Stereotypes a Generation

Maybe the best outcome of the brutally stereotypical article about the narcissism of Millennials is this: it's brought out a lot of folks eager to defend young people. Read More

Making Big Decisions in Your Twenties

A fascinating piece in The New Yorker about deciding whether to go to grad school (in English literature, in this case, but it would apply to almost any field, especially in the job-challenged humanities) mentions a recent paper by L.A. Paul and Kieran Healy on what they call "epistomological decision-making." Read More

No More Youthy Grandparents?

With young people waiting until their late 30s and even 40s to have their babies, the idea of a grandparent being alive and mobile when those babies walk down the aisle is almost laughable, or would be if it didn't make me so sad about my own non-existent grandbabies. Read More

Parenting a Twentysomething

I was desperate in my twenties for my parents to think of me as a co-adult, especially during one night that's seared in my memory. I was 22 years old, two and a half years out of college, and had just started working as a reporter for a small magazine for which I was traveling on my first-ever business trip. Read More

Getting Older Might Not Be So Bad

People think the elderly are sad, unattractive Luddites who feel lonely and financially strapped. But it turns out that people who actually ARE old don't feel nearly as bad as younger people expect. That's the reassuring news for all of us who are aging that came from results of new a poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. Read More

The Trickiness of Adjectives

People in their sixties, the graying Baby Boom generation so often cast in opposition to Millennials, are having a crisis of identity these days -- or, at least, a crisis of adjectives. Is there a way to describe them collectively without offending them? Would they balk at being called "old"? And do twentysomethings mind being called "young"? Read More

The Younger Generation Is Always Right

My daughter Samantha and I did another bit of publicity for our book Twentysomething yesterday: a taping of an upcoming episode of Katie Couric's new afternoon talk show, "Katie." But when Katie asked me what I thought of the Millennials, I gave the wrong answer. Here's what I should have said instead. Read More

Young and Old Alike Show Less Empathy Than the Middle-Aged

I'm always made uncomfortable by studies that assert that Millennials are the most narcissitic generation in history. To me, being young has always meant being self-absorbed; in many ways, that's what youth is for. But a new study that reaches a similar conclusion is less offensive, since it's not just the very young who are self-absorbed; the very old are, too. Read More

It's Tough to Be Young

Young adults feel more stress about their lives than people who are older, according to a new poll reported last week by Harris Interactive. According to an article in USA Today, nearly 4 in 10 Millennials (in this study, defined as people aged 18 to 33) say their stress has increased in the past year, and about half say it keeps them awake at night. Read More

Sixtysomethings and Twentysomethings

I've been thinking recently about sixtysomethings and how much they're like twentysomethings. (I can say "they" instead of "we" for just another eight months; I turn 60 myself next October, a birthday I'm definitely not looking forward to.) It's been called -- with a certain amount of relief -- the Post-Anything-Is-Possible stage. Read More

Confusion Loves Company

One young man struggling with decisions about his life wrote to my daughter to thank her for the book we wrote. "I've been struggling to make the process feel "right,"" he said in an email. "I often think about what's coming next," Our book was "a relief," he said, because it showed him that he's not the only young person plagued by thoughts like these. Read More

Every Stage Is The Toughest Stage

"We’re a self-absorbed species," writes columnist Frank Bruni in today's New York Times, "and one wrinkle of our self-absorption is our tendency, reflected in our art and entertainment, to believe that there’s no passage of human existence as fraught with perils and as peculiarly significant as the one we just so happen to be going through." Read More

An Abortion-Rights Advocate Talks About Millennials

The outgoing president of NARAL, the abortion-rights lobbying group, had a wide-ranging interview with an editor at Salon that ended with an assessment of whether young people care about abortion. Are they apolitical? Not exactly, Nancy Keenan said. They're suffering from something she called an "intensity gap." Read More

Parenting is Good for Your Health

After a holiday of excessive family togetherness, the findings of a recent study from Denmark might be met with a certain amount of skepticism -- that having children actually makes their parents live longer. Or at least keeps them from dying young. Read More

Growing Up Means Closing a Few Doors

In an MIT lab, undergraduates are getting paid money to open and close doors: real money, virtual doors. The students are navigating between rooms on a computer screen, part of a game devised by MIT psychologists to simulate how young people feel when their options slowly disappear. Read More

Delaying Parenthood May Come at a Cost

A remarkable cover story in this week's The New Republic says that our great natural experiment in late-life parenthood is not necessarily going to end well. Read More

You'll Know You're An Adult When . . .

There tends to be an "aha" moment when you realize you're not a kid anymore, and finally have to cop to being an adult. When was yours? Read More

The Noisy Lives of Young People

I love when an old piece of writing seems as if it could have been written yesterday, and could as easily be applied to today’s twenty-somethings as to the young Baby Boomers about whom it was intended. Read More

Generation Fill-in-the-Blank

If it seems like every week you're seeing a new label applied to today's twentysomethings, you're not far off. Generation Screwed, Generation Limbo, the Me Generation, Generation Sell—the labels keep coming, testament to our endless fascination with the golden 21-to-35-year-old demographic. Read More

What's the 'Best Age' to Have a Baby?

John Mirowsky, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has asked what the best age is to have a baby, noting the troubling disconnect in timing between being ready versus feeling ready. As he put it, “Humans mature reproductively about a decade before Americans mature socially.” Read More

Hating on the Hipsters

A Princeton prof says every generation has a defense mechanism. But every generation has thousands of them, along with thousands of world views, habits, sensibilities, strengths, weaknesses, fears, and dreams. Read More

The Page 99 Test

A book blogger asked me to apply The Page 99 Test to my own book. It tests the hypothesis expressed by the novelist Ford Madox Ford: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Read More

Student Loans and the Parents' Burden

Parents took out loans for their kids' education, and are finding themselves as trapped and burdened by the payoff as their children are. Read More

Regrets and Early-Life Trade-Offs

A misleading illustration accompanies an op-ed in today's New York Times called "Death: A Nice Opportunity for Regret." It shows a tombstone with the epitaph "I Wish I Hadn't." It's misleading because research shows that the correct epitaph, for most of us, would be "I Wish I Had." Read More

The Dark Side of Parental Love

The old saw that you're only as happy as your unhappiest child—even if the child is an adult—has some scientific underpinning. But there was one finding that was not only surprising but a bit disconcerting. The parents who thought their kids were better-adjusted than they themselves had been in their twenties weren’t all that pleased. Read More

Do Parents of Young Adults Swoop Too Much?

Stories about helicopter parents usually make my skin crawl, written as though the excesses of a few can stand in for the childrearing habits of an entire generation. These are the tales that always end up talking about raising kids who get trophies just for showing up. But a New York Times article last weekend had some descriptions that were positively delicious. Read More

"Find Your Passion" Isn't Always The Best Advice

Way before Big Bird sang “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?” in 1977, or Marlo Thomas wrote "Free to Be You and Me" in 1973, or the hippies of the 1960s were telling everyone to Do Your Own Thing, Man -- long before all that, there was the advice to “do what you love.” But maybe that advice is wrong. Read More

Robin Marantz Henig is a science journalist and co-author, with her daughter Samantha Henig, of Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?

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