Each Generation is taking longer to achieve independence—for good reason

No one can resist complaining about the generations that came after them. Even God protested in the Bible that “there arose another generation after… which knew not the Lord.”

Just look at the 2024 best-sellers and you’ll learn that Gen Z is anxious, depressed, and immature. Above all, today’s young adults “never really grow up” — with all the downsides of prolonged adolescence.

But is this generation really that much worse than those before? We analyzed over a century of American survey data to see.

The numbers are clear: Gen Z is the least developed of any generation that came before. But there are important caveats that show this delay is part of longer-term, largely beneficial trends.

Analyzing Adulting

Measuring maturity is hard. One way is to look at major milestones: moving out of your parents’ home, getting married, and having children. Along these dimensions, Gen Z is noticeably slower to mature. Whereas 20% of Gen Xers had hit these three metrics by 22, only 8% of Gen Zers had done so!

Here’s a graph showing the share of each generation that has accomplished all three of those markers at each age. You have to squint to see the adulting of 20-year-old Gen Zers because they’re maturing at a glacial pace.

But if you step back and look at every generation, you’ll notice that delayed adulthood isn’t anything new. Every generation since the silent generation has delayed these life achievements compared to the cohort that came before, hence the falling curves.

Another way to see this trend is to graph the age at which 10% of a given generation marries or has a child. There’s been a steady upward trajectory for each cohort, and Gen Z is pretty much on-trend with that trajectory.

That being said, it does look like there was an inflection point with Millennials, where the rate of delay increased. Indeed, the milestone gap between Gen X and Millennials is much, much bigger than the current gap between Millennials and Gen Z. Much of the blame for prolonged adolescence rests with older cohorts.

It’s unfair, then, to single out Gen Z as uniquely immature; they are just following the behavior set by their parents and grandparents.

Kids These Days

The long-term build up of prolonged adolescence suggests that some structural factors are at play, some of which are bad.

High housing prices combined with worse career prospects likely slow the transition to independent adulthood. Plus, the decay of civic and social life loosens bonds that used to propel young adults into marriage.

But the balance of evidence suggests Gen Z’s delayed adulthood isn’t cause for concern (so far).

For one, there are good reasons for young adults to defer these milestones. Longer careers and life spans lower the cost of doing so — and raises the benefit of investing in education early on.

Others have made this same point: increased schooling explains a lot of the delay. To test this, we controlled for higher educational attainment by comparing adults across generations with the same schooling status, i.e. those currently in school and currently not in school. This apples-to-apples comparison removes a lot of the milestone gap for Gen Z, meaning delayed adulthood has a salutary cause: more schooling.

And the fourth horseman of adulthood — employment — hasn’t declined over time. Young Gen Zers’ employment rates are second only to Gen X.

Gen Z aren’t a bunch of big babies — their priorities are simply different than their grandparents had the same age. Young adults today delay social maturation in favor of educational and career investment.

Most important, delaying is not the same as scrapping. If you look back at the first graph, you’ll see that Millennials have nearly caught up to Gen X on these milestones by the time they’re 40. Gen Z will likely do the same: invest in education and professional advancement early on, then pivot to family formation in their 30s.

It’s the god-given right of older generations to criticize the kids these days. But those critics should recognize they themselves also prolonged adolescence relative to those that came before. They likely had good reasons for doing so, and so does the current generation.