Here’s What It Takes to Be an Adult

What is adulthood? When most people talk about a delayed transition to adulthood, they’re talking about someone’s inability to become financially stable. This holds true whether we’re talking about Hikikomori in Japan, NEETs in the UK, or failure to launch in America. In all three, we’re naming a seemingly able-bodied 20-something-year-old’s inability to support themselves through work as delaying adulthood. Of course, home-owning parents may interject that they still feel like an 18-year old, especially when playing 80s music.

That qualifier is true but doesn’t change the fact that societies all over the world view the concept of an adult as self-supporting and self-directed, because it identifies a point in the life cycle. Even collectivist tribes had initiations signifying an adolescent becoming an adult. Granted, adult skills were obtained earlier on in the life cycle, as evidenced by the recent plane crash in the Colombian jungle, where the only survivors were a group of kids who survived for weeks before being rescued. They knew how to survive because they were taught to.

As Jonathan Haidt points out in The Anxious Generation, today’s parents’ refusal and fear of letting kids do more household chores has added to their inability to feel competent and, thus, confident in themselves. Psychologist Erik Erikson wrote about this in his book, Identity and the Life Cycle, naming industry vs. inferiority as the stage when kids learn self-direction and mastery. When this stage is denied it creates a sense of insecurity.

But Erikson’s other cycles are just as important — they teach emotional awareness and regulation as well as identity. If these life cycles are delayed, interrupted, or denied it hinders our ability to learn how to self-regulate emotions and states of self. We feel incapable of accessing our states of self, regulating unpleasant sensations, and manipulating the energy that stitches together the fabric of our inner world.

Erikson wisely said that “doing well” is cultural in the sense of what position you have or what sort of car you drive, but “doing well” psychologically (and perhaps spiritually) is being able to roll with the tide of emotions, manage them, communicate clearly and well with others, and master various skills. This requires an internal locus of control, which implies self-control and ownership of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. In other words, you're playing the game of life — life isn't playing you. You're self-directed and not reliant on the world to tell you who you are or validate your emotions. And you know who you are within all this. Steven Hayes, father of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, calls this psychological flexibility.

So, being an adult isn’t just holding a job. Look around (or watch White Lotus): There are plenty of people who hold jobs and support themselves and their families while behaving like teenagers. Some of them even hold the highest positions of power. Being an adult is about having a rooted sense of self while being able to identify and manage your emotions and actions. It’s being able to use empathy when communicating with others. We are a social species so this is important. Kids, after all, learn by modeling. Remember that D.A.R.E. campaign, where the father asks the son where he learned to use the drugs, and the kid says, “I learned it by watching you!” If parents complete life’s cycles — and become masters of themselves — then their kids probably will, too.

As an adult, you're capable of reflecting on your behavior and thoughts with objectivity and openness. You can learn and grow. You can repair conflicts that rupture. In Mindsight, Dan Siegel attributes this to being aware of how our mind can help us with these functions: bodily regulation, attuned communication, emotional balance, response flexibility, fear modulation, empathy, insight, moral awareness, and intention. Siegel acknowledges through anecdotes that he doesn’t get this right all the time. Who can? No one is perfect. But adults are aware of it and can calibrate and repair when we falter.

While raising an adult is a parent’s job, it’s also all of our jobs as a society to ensure that we support schools that nurture emotional and identity development, regulations around technology, and programs that help usher these phases along. It’s also our job as a society to support adults who need help repairing incomplete life cycles because funding and resources for healthcare are in jeopardy.

The stakes aren't limited to those 20-somethings in suspended adolescence, many of whom felt so rejected by society that they were susceptible to authoritarian rule. Erikson, a Jew who endured Eastern European authoritarianism, wrote this in 1958: “If we want to make the world safe for democracy, we must first make democracy safe for the healthy child. In order to ban autocracy, exploitation, and inequality in the world, we must first realize that the first inequality in life is that of child and adult.” There are many ways we can fight the rise of authoritarianism in our country. But attending to our emotional maturity is a simple and vital way to do so.