Emerging Adulthood

The NY Times Magazine last week had a very interesting article about 20-somethings and why they take so long to grow up. The basis is that there is a newly recognized stage in life called 'emerging adults', where they make some of their own decisions but defer others to parents or society. It is long but worth the 30 minutes it may take you to read it (that's how long it took me).
Here are some points I liked:

If society decides to protect these young people or treat them differently from fully grown adults, how can we do this without becoming all the things that grown children resist — controlling, moralizing, paternalistic? Young people spend their lives lumped into age-related clusters — that’s the basis of K-12 schooling — but as they move through their 20s, they diverge. Some 25-year-olds are married homeowners with good jobs and a couple of kids; others are still living with their parents and working at transient jobs, or not working at all. Does that mean we extend some of the protections and special status of adolescence to all people in their 20s? To some of them? Which ones? Decisions like this matter, because failing to protect and support vulnerable young people can lead them down the wrong path at a critical moment, the one that can determine all subsequent paths. But overprotecting and oversupporting them can sometimes make matters worse, turning the “changing timetable of adulthood” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 [A 25 year old commenting] “to think about all the things I’m supposed to be doing in order to ‘get somewhere’ successful: ‘Follow your passions, live your dreams, take risks, network with the right people, find mentors, be financially responsible, volunteer, work, think about or go to grad school, fall in love and maintain personal well-being, mental health and nutrition.’ When is there time to just be and enjoy?” 

And in case you thought Kollel support only exists by frum Jews:

[..] asked parents of grown children whether they provided significant assistance to their sons or daughters. Assistance included giving their children money or help with everyday tasks (practical assistance) as well as advice, companionship and an attentive ear. Eighty-six percent said they had provided advice in the previous month; less than half had done so in 1988. Two out of three parents had given a son or daughter practical assistance in the previous month; in 1988, only one in three had. 

For a comforting conclusion:

Arnett would like to see us choose a middle course. “To be a young American today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.” If it really works that way, if this longer road to adulthood really leads to more insight and better choices, then Arnett’s vision of an insightful, sensitive, thoughtful, content, well-honed, self-actualizing crop of grown-ups would indeed be something worth waiting for.

I could only theorize about this impact on our community, but you are free to make your own conclusions; recognizing that singles may actually want to be that way a little longer, that they want to develop themselves and careers before a family. Of course that we as a community would have to recognize a developmental stage between adolescence and ready to get married, would really wreak havoc with our  understanding of Jewish life as it is. It would mean accepting a single and not treating them as second class citizens, something that people like Bad4 only theorize about.

 

The Changing Times?

A pair of excellent posts worthy of your time out there, if you're a religious Jew of the 21st century; excerpts on expand.

• The Apple on how women are taught Halacha in the frum world and
  

  girls are often taught halacha in a very simple, non-source-based way. For example, where I went to high school, we learned halacha like this: the teacher (who was a noted posek who definitely knew what he was talking about, no question - I just take issue with the method) would hand out a sheet of questions on a particular topic, and then would go through the questions and give us the answers. There was no source sheet, we never had to look into a sefer - we were literally spoon-fed the answers.
  
  What did this mean? Well, it meant that we knew an awful lot of information without a) knowing the sources b) knowing how to look at sources. Which is problematic. Why? Because there was an implicit statement of, "No need to teach you this, because you can rely on your father/brother/husband to tell you the answer when you have a question." It was practically a given that people would have someone like that to turn to for the answers.
  
  But guess what. Not everyone has that. Not everyone has a father who spent many years in yeshiva learning gemara, or a brother who is currently in yeshiva, or a husband. And there comes a point where you want to look something up because you are tired of always relying on other people for what to do, but you know what? You can't. Because you've never been taught how, or where, to look. You haven't the faintest idea of the structure of the Mishna Berura, or the Kaf HaChaim. Shulchan Aruch? Forget it. You haven't a clue as to where a halacha originated in the gemara or the mishnah. Whenever a teacher referenced those sefarim, it was a passing mention and you only have a vague idea as to what the sefer actually contains and accomplishes.

• R' Aviner on evolution at R' Gil's [emphasis mine].

  Regarding the essential question of whether Hashem created man directly from the earth or whether Hashem created man in a slow process from the earth in stages, we do not know factually, since we were not there. It is possible to explain the verses of the Torah either way. ...
  
  In sum: We are involved with Torah; we are not involved with science. We love science, we respect science and we respect scientists. There is even a blessing upon seeing a great scientist: Blessed is Hashem…who gave of His wisdom to flesh and blood (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 224:7). The Torah, however, is not a science book. Whether man was created directly from the ground or from a long process is not the subject of the Torah. Our subject is how man needs to act...