James Urry

In modern New Zealand a person's age calculated from their birth is crucial in defining their rights, duties and obligations in society. Nowhere is this more apparent than during the transition to adulthood. But when does this process of transition begin and when does it end? When is a young person considered an adult?

An examination of "official" numerical ages for the marking of responsibilities of young people reveals a very confusing series of legal markers. This is true of all industrial states where the rise of legal and bureaucratic systems over the past two centuries saw the initial codification of customary ideas concerned with age and generation. These older customary categories have often been adjusted and overlaid with new markers created to deal with the increasing complexity of government and industrial society.

In New Zealand a person officially ceases to be a child and becomes a young person at age 14. At 15 a person can obtain a driver's licence. From age 16 onwards many new rights and responsibilities of young people are defined in law. At 16 consensual sex can occur, young people can marry with their parent's consent, they have the right to work, to receive certain benefits and are required to assume a degree of responsibility for their actions. At 18 young people can vote and in this sense become citizens of the nation state, the supreme social category and grouping beyond that of the family headed by their parent(s). However, they soon will be liberated entirely from parental control. Since the age of 16 parents have not been held responsible for their offspring's financial support although young people remain under their parent's guardianship until the age of 20. They cannot drink freely until aged 20 and can only marry without parental consent at 20. Most infamous of all is the fact that their parent's income is still used to assess their right to income support in tertiary education until they are 25, seven years after reaching the age of citizenship and five years after being released from their parent's guardianship.

The range, complexity and contradictions of these official numerical-based markers has not been lost upon policy makers in recent years. Currently the age of driving licences, the legal age of drinking, employment and student support are just some of the areas of common concern in government. In the ordered minds of administrators there is inevitably an attempt to produce a rational system, centring either on a single date defining the accession to adulthood or at least a series of consistent dates marking the transfer to adulthood.

But what do young people and their parents think about the period of transition to adulthood and when adulthood is achieved? This is where some results of the Youth and Family Project reveal the complexity of the issues from the "native's point of view" in contrast to the speculations of officialdom and its policy advisers.

Through extensive use of questionnaires, intensive interviews with groups and individuals and participation in social groups the Youth and Family Project has established a "window" within which most people consider the transition from childhood to adulthood occurs. For the majority of both parents and young people this "window" of transition occurs between the ages of 16 and 20, with a slight favouring on the period between 18 to 20. While many people aged below 16 might consider they are already "young people", most parents, older young people and young adults see those under 16 as still children.

Young people and their parents, however, agree that adulthood does not just happen at a single age. It involves a long process of transition which varies considerably in terms of its beginning and end from person to person. In both groups a few people explained that some individuals might not reach adulthood until 25 or even 30. Some parents claimed (only half jokingly) that they yet had to achieve adulthood while a very few denied that adulthood even existed. A number denied the relevance of setting dates at all ("It cannot be defined just by the number of candles you have on your birthday cake"). For some young people adulthood was seen as being a matter of choice and could vary according to circumstance. While at times they wanted to act and be treated as adults, at other times they wanted to act and be treated as "kids."

An interesting finding of this research is the fact that even numbered ages were preferred over odd numbered ages. Thus 16 - 18 - 20 were the most often mentioned ages while those of 15 - 17 - 19 were rarely discussed or were seen as anomalous; 21, the "traditional" age marking the acquisition of adulthood appears to belong to a distant age. Why this favouring of even numbers exists is unclear. It may reflect a psychological preference for round numbers, but policy makers considering setting dates to mark age-related rights and responsibilities might like to bear this finding in mind.

The issue of what constitutes adulthood for our informants proves to be complex. When asked what do they think "makes an adult", both parents and young people use the same terms but with different emphases and interpretations. The three terms most commonly mentioned were "maturity", "responsibility" and "independence."

Maturity was the concept most favoured by young people involved in the transition to adulthood. No doubt this reflects their own experience of physical and social maturing. Indeed, when explaining the term they spoke of physical factors ("bigger balls" as one young male put it); psychological traits such as "emotional" maturity; and social maturity including getting a job, having money and leaving home, important markers of the stages leading towards the status of adulthood. Parents, who placed maturity last in the list of terms, emphasised maturing minds rather than physical factors ("when the mind catches up with the adolescent body") and stressed social and rational skills ("able to make sound and reasonable judgements").

Independence was most stressed by parents and the least by young people probably because they are still dependent on their parents. Independence was seen as being marked by events, sometimes in a set of sequences: finishing education/leaving home/getting a real job/earning wages/achieving financial independence, with only a vague reference to forming a partnership/getting married, having children etc. Parents constantly stressed "financial independence." These circumstantial markers of independence were combined with social and psychological traits. These included being intellectually independent and able to make rational decisions and choices as well as achieving emotional independence.

Both parents and young people placed responsibility in second place. For young people this tended to be a concept without much content. This is because real responsibility has still to come and be accepted, but also because responsibility at these ages tends to have meaning only in terms of responsibility to self. Parents stressed that independence was closely bound with accepting responsibility and that both were a measure of maturity.

What is interesting about the way these three concepts were ranked and interconnected is that both parents and young people recognised that they involved very individualised processes. For young people, accepting responsibility and gaining independence were very much personal choices; they as "individuals" would choose when and where they would achieve these ends. Only the parents, however, emphasised the social aspects of gaining adulthood along with personal, individual choice. While stressing the need for their children to achieve selfhood as individuated persons, parents also wanted them to relate to others, be part of a "community," to make "sacrifices" and act as members of a "team."

This parental view of the process of transition reflects the balancing act involved in socialisation. While encouraging independence in young people they also need to establish a sense of responsibility to both self and others in society. The language used by parents to express the process of transition reflects this double emphasis and the contradictions inherent in it. Young people need to be "self-confidant" and require "self-esteem." They have to be "self-disciplined, self-reliant, self-sufficient and self-actualising." But in achieving these positive virtues young people must avoid the negative aspects such as "self-centredness" and being subject to "peer pressure."

For both parents and young people the transition to adulthood clearly involves the creation of a whole individuated, self-sufficient autonomous person, able to act independently with maturity and responsibility. Adulthood is achieved when independence, responsibility and maturity are combined. This is when an individual finds regular employment which utilises all the skills they personally have acquired through the competitive education system and where, upon achieving a good wage, they can prove this independence from their parents, move away from home, adopt a life style and fulfil their own destiny.

What is remarkable about this emphasis on seeking independence, a view shared by both parents and young people, is that it contrasts so strongly with patterns of socialisation and enculturation anthropologists usually encounter in non-industrial societies. In these societies, where most life is connected to agricultural production, people are tied to land and community through institutions of interdependence. Generations are locked into a continuous set of inter-related dependencies: young children are raised and cared for by parents who expect their children, when grown to maturity, to look after them in their old age. Ties of kinship and community bind generations together, people are relatively immobile, individuated personhood and personal independence are denied as persons are bound in a set of multiplex roles, responsibilities and obligations. People are encouraged to view themselves not as self-sufficient individuals, as but collective persons who at different stages in a shared life cycle assume pre-ordained rights, responsibilities and duties.

The Youth and Family Project has found the remnants of such a view of the world not only among the larger population of the industrial society which exists in New Zealand, but also among newer immigrant groups from agrarian backgrounds and some of those who emphasise Maori descent. In both cases these views reflect a closeness to past agrarian ways of life. However, these are changing in each new generation as younger people integrate into the larger industrial society. In these cases, to varying degree, the older values of interdependency and continuity of society are cultural categories which do not operate in the major social contexts in which they are involved.

In New Zealand, as in all other industrialised societies, young people are encouraged both by their parents and the state to achieve individuated personhood. This is a social identity which is reflected in the idea of the "individual" and its opposite "society." Individuals must achieve full responsibility and independence and not be too tied to place, to community or other social attachments if they are to achieve their full worth. People must be willing to leave home, find jobs, maximise their skills and exercise their right to "choose." Both parents and the state (in its educational and other policies) emphasise this in their support of young people during the transition to adulthood in order to produce competent citizens, who participate fully in the life of the nation.

However the category of adulthood is obviously undergoing revision in response to other forces than the needs of the state. Young adults, those aged between 20 and 30 who have completed advanced education and training, secured good jobs and are earning high incomes, view themselves not only as in work, but also capable of participating fully in a rich consumer world of goods and choices, indulging in chosen a life-style which emphasises leisure activities. Young adults work hard in order to have more leisure. In a sense the juvenile world has been extended into early adulthood. Young adults "play" and are unwilling to commit themselves to dependent relationships which will restrict their opportunities to indulge themselves, make them socially and physically immobile and prevent them from the fun of taking risks. Having sacrificed their early youth to education (work without payment), they now want time to catch up with their lost youth. Whereas in the past leaving school, getting a job and establishing a career were seen as inevitable stages leading to marriage and raising a family, these are now seen as more distant "choices" in the life cycle.

For young people undergoing the transition to adulthood, the world of young adulthood which lies ahead is a major focus of their lives. It influences both their acquisition of knowledge and skill and their parent's decisions to encourage them to gain skills including staying at school, going on to tertiary education and obtaining "qualifications" in order to secure a good job so real life can begin.

While the state still requires parents in families to undertake the complex process of bearing, rearing and raising children, it is neither to the parents nor their family's advantage. From age 6 to 16 the state requires parents to send their children to school. Here they begin the process of gaining knowledge and skill, as well as the independence required to become individuated persons and useful citizens for the nation state. Presently, while they achieve this status at 18, their parents somehow are still responsible for them until age 20 and for paying their tertiary fees until age 25. These anomalies persist because the modern industrial world evolved often in spite of human planning and policy makers. In the modern world the processes of transition to adulthood and the world young people are entering are undergoing fundamental transformations. Not only are young people and their parents confused, but so are agents of the state as to when to set the age of adulthood.

10/98