process of growing up essay

Essays About Growing Up: 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Essays about growing up help us view and understand various experiences from different perspectives. Check out our top examples and prompts for your writing.

How do you know when you’ve finally grown up? Me, it happened when I was in high school. I realized I matured when I had no qualms about looking for ways to help my family financially. I didn’t think I had a choice, but at the same time, I desperately wanted to aid my parents in ensuring we had food on the table. 

I was a fast food crew member, a librarian, and many other odd jobs I could talk about for hours. Some judge my parents’ poor financial literacy when I tell my stories, but I never did. All of it was a part of my growing up; without these experiences, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. 

Growing up is a unique experience for every person, influenced by our surroundings and influences. With so many variables, each person has their own story about growing up; take a look below to see the best example and prompts to begin writing your own. You might also like these essays about youth .

5 Essay Examples

1. social influences on children’s growing up by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. growing up in the 626 by katie gee salisbury, 3. growing up in poverty determines the person’s fate by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 4. growing up on the streets by writer bernadette, 5. growing up with hearing loss by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 1. what does growing up mean, 2. the effect of my environment on my growth, 3. growing up rich or poor, 4. family values and growing up, 5. growing up with siblings, 6. your best memories growing up, 7. changes while growing up.

“Human growth and development is a complicated process which is inevitably impacted upon by socioeconomic circumstances within which an individual is growing up.”

To demonstrate the social influences that can impact a child’s experiences growing up, the essay offers several credible citations from professionals, such as Damon and Lerner, the writer and editor of “ Handbook of Child Psychology .” It looks at how social factors, such as living conditions, access to resources, and others, can affect a child’s overall development as they grow. Ultimately, the writer believes that parents play a huge role in the development of their children. You can also check out these essays about development .

“Something welled up inside my throat. All of a sudden I felt a burning urgency to stake a claim, to assert that I was one of them, that I too belonged in this group. ‘Hey guys, I’m Chinese too,’ I ventured. A classmate who carpooled with my family was quick to counter, ‘Katie, that doesn’t count.'”

Salisbury shares her experiences as an overachieving Asian-American, focusing on her grievances at being biracial, not connecting to her heritage, and people’s assumption of her being white. She talks about her life in 626, the area code for Arcadia, Southern California, where most Asians reside. At the end of her essay, Salisbury offers facts about herself to the reader, recognizing and accepting every part of herself.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about time .

“Economic mobility is the ability of someone or a family to move up from one income group to another. In the United States, it is at an all-time low and is currently decreasing.”

The author shares their opinion on how a family’s financial situation shapes their children’s future. To back up their claim, the essay provides relevant statistics showing the number of children and families in poverty, alongside its dramatic effects on a child’s overall development. The writer mentions that a family’s economic incompetence can pass on to the children, reducing their chances of receiving a proper education.

“As a young black woman growing up on the hardcore streets of North Philadelphia, you have to strive and fight for everything. The negativity and madness can grab and swallow even the most well-behaved kids.”

Bernadette opens her readers’ eyes to the harsh realities of being a young black woman throughout her essay. However, she also expresses her gratitude to her family, who encouraged her to have a positive mindset. Her parents, who also grew up on the streets of North Philly, were determined to give her and her siblings a proper education. 

She knows how individuals’ environments impact their values ​​and choices, so she fought hard to endure her circumstances. She also notes that the lack of exposure to different social norms results in children having limited thinking and prevents them from entertaining new perspectives. You might be interested in these essays about dream jobs .

“The world is not accommodating to people with hearing disabilities: apart from professionals, barely anyone knows and understands sign language. On top of that, many are merely unaware of the fact that they might be hurting and making a deaf person feel disrespected.”

The essay discusses critical issues in children growing up with hearing impairments. It includes situations that show the difference between a child growing up in an all-deaf family and a non-deaf environment. While parental love and support are essential, deaf parents should consider hearing impairment a gift and be aware of their children’s needs. 

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

7 Prompts for Essays About Growing Up

Growing up is a continuous sequence where we develop and experience significant changes in our bodies and how we think and feel. It’s the transition between being a child and an adult, so define what childhood and adulthood entail in your essay.

Then, describe how an individual grows up and the indications that they progressed physically and intellectually. For a fun addition to your essay, include questions your readers can answer to see if they have matured.

Many studies show how people’s environments, such as home, community, and school, affect growth. These environments significantly impact an individual’s development through interactions. For this prompt, write about the factors that influence your overall development and explain how you think they affected you. For example, those who studied at a religious school tend to be more conservative.

Money is essential for survival, but only some have easy access. Most people act and make decisions based on how much money they have, which also influences their behavior. In this prompt, cite several situations where money affects parents’ decisions about their children’s needs and wants and how it affects the children as they grow up.

Discuss how financial constraints impact their emotions, perceptions, and choices in life. Choose high, average, and low-income households, then compare and contrast their situations. To create an in-depth analysis, use interview research and statistical data to back up your arguments.

Studies show that children understand rules and have already formed their behaviors and attitudes at seven. Before this age, children are surrounded by relatives who teach them values through experiences within the family. For this prompt, use real-life examples and factual information to discuss the importance of good parenting in instilling good values ​​in children.

Growing up with siblings is an entirely different experience growing up versus being an only child. Use this prompt to explain how having a brother or sister can impact a child’s progress and discuss its pros and cons. For instance, having siblings means the child has more role models and can get more emotional support. However, it can also mean that a child craves more of their parent’s attention. Discuss these points in your essay, and decide the “better” experience, for a fun argumentative essay.

In this essay, choose the best memories you had from childhood to the current day that has contributed significantly to your principles and outlook. Describe each memory and share how it changed you, for better or worse.

Talk about the changes people expect as they grow up. These physical, emotional, or mental changes lead people to act and think more maturely.  Add studies demonstrating the necessity of these changes and recount instances when you realize that you’ve grown up. For example, if before you didn’t care about your spending, now you’re more frugal and learned to save money. For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Childhood and Growing up Essay: Titles & Examples

What are the challenges of growing up? This question is thought-provoking and exciting to answer. Each person has their unique experience, and for many the process of growing up is not easy. Some live in poverty, others have complex family relationships. A childhood and growing up essay allows you to discover your new sides and see how well you know yourself.

This article is a writing guide for an essay about growing up. It contains creative essay titles on the topic, together with writing prompts and short essay examples. Get inspired to write your growing up essay with us!

• 📝 Growing up Writing Prompts
• 📚 Growing up Essay Topics
• 📜 Essay Sample #1
• 📜 Essay Sample #2

📝 What Are the Challenges of Growing Up? Essay Prompts 

Every child is unique, so that everyone can tell a different childhood story.

What is typical for everyone – the process of growing up is a challenge. Although there’re lots of challenges, it’s also an exciting experience.

Growing up essays usually describe hobbies, relationships with siblings, difficulties with parents, etc. Check our essay ideas below.

What Does It Mean to Grow up?

This is not only about aging or changing your looks. Growing up is a physical and a deep psychological process at the same time. Your picture of the world changes, people come and go, and you change too.

Creating a mind map of your childhood can help you understand what exactly growing up was to you.

A reflective childhood & growing up essay can involve such matters:

• Taking on new responsibilities.
• Learning from mistakes.
• Changes in attitude towards people.
• Childhood dreams and ambitions.
• Childhood beliefs and values.
• Independence, confidence, and self-acceptance.
• Life lessons that shaped one’s personality.
• People who affected the growing up process.

Growing up in a Small Town Essay

Describe the details of being a child in a small town. You can also describe the pluses and minuses of living in a small town. It can be a general overview, but better try to connect it to your life and experience.

In this kind of a growing up essay, you might write about:

• Knowing everyone around.
• Local school.
• The first summer job.
• The places that have always been special.

A comparative essay is a good choice in this case. Discuss why life in small towns is different from life in big cities.

Growing up without a Father Essay

How many children in the United States grow up in single-parent families?

Growing up with a single parent is certainly not the only thing that shapes a kid’s personality. However, it is one of the essential factors, for sure.

• Check the statistics to see how many children grow up with one parent.
• Tell about the mother’s efforts to raise children alone while working.
• Include stories about relatives that were of immense help: siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
• Describe a person who substitutes father and his role.

Growing up without a Mother Essay

This topic might seem similar to the previous one, but there are several differences.

• Write about the general psychological effects of growing up without a mother.
• Compare the scientific facts with personal experience and conclude.
• Describe how it affects adult life and childhood.
• Write about the typical leisure time with father.

While describing a relationship with a father, describe daily responsibilities and how they influence a child’s life. What challenges do children growing up with a single parent experience?

Growing up Asian in America Essay

Even though the US is multicultural, there are still issues that people of color face. Including children.

Explain how the childhood of an Asian is different from the experience of white Americans. Describe it if you were a part of an Asian community such as a neighborhood or school you attended. Write about your national traditions that you maintained or abandoned.

In your essay on growing up, describe the challenges you overcame. These might include:

• The time you faced racism.
• The stereotypes and misconceptions you faced.
• The choice between your identity and the one imposed by society.
• How has the social position of Asians in the United States changed?

Growing up in Poverty Essay

How many young Americans live in families with incomes below the poverty threshold? There are several risks which growing up in poverty possesses.

You can discuss them in your growing-up-poor essay:

• Malnutrition. Starting from low birth weight, ending with health problems.
• Psychological damage. Being in need as a child might cause emotional and behavioral issues.
• Academic failures. Some poor children have to work and attend school at the same time. This interferes with the proper learning process.

Use growing up in poverty topic for a problem-solution essay. Here you can discuss how to deal with poverty and provide equal opportunities for all children.

Growing up in Two Cultures Essay

Adapting to a new culture is a complicated process. It is a massive challenge for children as they can’t identify themselves.

Here is what you can discuss in your essay on growing up:

• Traditions of your family. They might include cuisine, holidays, religious practices.
• Transcultural adaptation. Describe the change of behavioral patterns, language, or looks.
• Your relationships with peers. Tell about the situations you remember: bad experiences such as bullying or good ones such as interest in your culture.

Write a narrative essay about your vision of what it’s like to be a person who belongs to two cultures.

📚 Essay Titles about Growing Up

And here is your selection of essay topics that you can also use as ideas for a speech or discussion.

You can pick your essay title from this list:

• What country is the best for children to grow up in?
• Should kids and teenagers work during the summer holidays?
• Explain how growing up among American children influences children of migrants.
• What is the most important lesson you learned from your parents?
• Were you more like your father or mother as a child?
• What do you think you needed the most as a child?
• What are the common problems between parents and adolescents?
• Have you ever been a victim or took part in school bullying?
• What are the consequences of growing up too fast?
• Describe a life-changing experience from your childhood.
• How to motivate children to study based on their early childhood performance?
• Does having a pet teach children responsibility?
• Did you have any secrets that you kept from your parents?
• What is it like growing up in a small town with big ambitions?
• What tips could you give your parents if you went back in time?
• What advice would you give yourself if you went back in time?
• How did your race and ethnicity affect your childhood?
• Describe your childhood hobby and the achievements in it.
• How do childhood problems might affect adult life?
• Is it more challenging to grow up as a girl or a boy?
• Who was your role model as you were a child?
• What challenges did you face while growing up, which you think others didn’t?
• What was the biggest mistake you made in your childhood?
• What are the psychological effects of family issues on children?
• How well do you remember your childhood?
• What are the main reasons for suicide among teenagers?
• Describe your best childhood friend and your relationship.
• How does growing up in a low-income family affect one’s attitude to money?
• Why do children lie to their parents?
• What is your brightest childhood memory?
• Why do teenagers tend to be rebellious and sometimes violent?
• What would you change in your childhood if you had a chance?
• Describe the moment when you felt you had grown up.
• How has your music taste changed since you were a kid?
• How to instill tolerance in children from an early age?
• Growing up without a father made me a stronger person.
• What was your dream profession when you were a child?
• What is the most unforgettable present you received as a kid?
• Were you popular in middle and high school?
• What is your earliest childhood memory, and why do you think it’s this one ?
• What is the best advice you have received as a child?
• How successful were you academically as a child?
• How to avoid and prevent bullying at school?
• What experience in your family affected you the most and why?
• Did your parents support your dreams and ambitions?
• How can you describe your relationships with your siblings?
• What were the common traits of teenagers of your generation ?
• What is the most valuable object that reminds you of childhood?
• Describe your first love and what you felt about it?
• How did your family affect your current values?
• Videogame Addiction and Its Impact on Children.
• Can a single parent provide enough attention and care to their children?
• Who was the closest to you in your family?
• What are the things your parents have done you are grateful for?
• What opportunities do you wish you could have as a kid?
• What were your phobias in childhood or as a teenager ?
• What were your strong and weak sides when you were a child?
• What do you want your future family to be like?
• How to detect and prevent child abuse at early stages?
• Why do teenagers try smoking , drugs, or alcohol?

📜 Growing Up Essay Example #1

To make it easier for you, our experts prepared a couple of childhood and growing up essays. Check them below!

Everyone defines growing up in their way. It is more than just physical changes that you notice in the mirror. As for me, growing up means accepting responsibilities, being able to take care of somebody, and becoming independent. I remember the first time my parents asked me to babysit my little sister. Rachel was a silent kid, but I was nervous anyway. I wanted my parents to come home as early as possible because I was afraid of the responsibility. I felt as if they entrusted her life and safety to me, just a teenager. Some weeks later, I discovered that it was not terrifying me anymore. We had fun together; I taught her how to play games and enjoyed our time together. Rachel was also the first person I learned to take care of. I helped my sister with her homework, picked her from school, and gave her advice when she asked for it. The feeling that I do it without waiting for something in return taught me a lot. I changed my attitude towards people, learned how to be kind and generous. Now I am sure that I will be able to nurture my kids in the future. Moving to a college dormitory made me independent. I thought I was an adult fully responsible for myself at high school, but I was wrong. Living alone and being in charge of my life motivated me to change a lot. I learned how to spend time alone, value it and take care of my health. I also started managing my time rationally. Independence doesn’t mean you don’t need other people in your life. It means you can rely on yourself in any case. I can’t say that I am a one hundred percent adult at this stage of my life. I am sure that I grew up helping my parents, my sister, and myself. I changed a lot. But many challenges are waiting for me in the future. Taking up more responsibilities and facing difficulties will help me on my way.

📜 Growing Up Essay Example #2

Growing up asian in america.

Asian-American children are a vulnerable group that needs protection. My experience is an excellent example of the difficulties that Asian-Americans might face in their childhood. As an Asian, I faced bullying at school, low expectations regarding my future career, and troubles with self-identification. High school was a hard time for me. 21.7% of Asians report being bullied at school . The rate is the highest among all the ethnic groups. I didn’t report my own experience as I didn’t want to seem weak. I was bullied because I studied harder than many other students and cared about my grades too much. I am sure that I would have been bullied less if I were a white child. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious regardless of your ethnicity. My family and friends didn’t support my aspiration to become a doctor. They said that no one from my family went to college and that it was too hard to be admitted. It was challenging to keep my motivation without support. Even when they knew I had all the chances to receive financial aid, they just didn’t believe it. It was always hard for me to identify myself. I don’t know if I am like children from China as I have never been there. I was born and raised in the United States. But my motherland does not feel like home too. I don’t look like many of my peers, and my family has a different lifestyle and traditions. I don’t think that I belong to any of the communities. In conclusion, my experience shows how a childhood of an Asian-American kid might look like. I feel that further generations will confront similar challenges facing society and themselves. That is why I want to raise attention to the mentioned problems and change people’s attitudes.

We hope that our article clarified what a growing up essay should look like.

We will be glad to learn about your experience of writing such an essay! Share your thoughts below in the comment section.

This is it for today. Good luck and happy writing!

Growing Up Essay: Guide & Examples [2024]

What does it mean to grow up? Essays on this topic might be entertaining yet challenging to write. Growing up is usually associated with something new and exciting. It’s a period of everything new and unknown.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

Now, you’ve been assigned to write a growing up essay. You’re not a kid anymore, but not quite the adult. It would be interesting for your teacher to learn about your childhood memories or read what you think about the experience of growing up.

That’s why:

In this article, we will provide a guide on how to write an essay on growing up. Our team listed some topics to make your writing process more manageable.

• 📍 How to Write It

🏡 About Your Childhood

🧒 about someone else.

• 👧 Growing Up

🔗 References

📍 how to write a growing up essay.

Writing an essay about growing up can seem complicated, but it’s always easier to handle when you have a plan. In this section, we will talk more about how to write an essay on the topic.

• Reflective essays focus on the author’s attitude towards individual experiences. This type is often required during the college admissions process. For instance, one may write about growing up in poverty and how it shaped his character.
• Narrative essays focus on a specific event or sequence of events. For example, you might write about the most memorable trip from your childhood.
• Choose the topic on the familiar subject. It will be easier to reflect on the issue when you have a lot of relevant experience.
• Choose the topic of interest. Write about something that provokes a strong emotional reaction from you.
• Show a unique vision on the topic. Try to approach writing college essays about growing up from a different perspective. When writing a narrative essay, you need to remember that your work should tell a story. Your essay topic about growing up needs to agree with the paper’s length and follow the essay structure. Focus on a specific point in your writing.
• Think about the event in your life that provokes a strong emotional response;
• Write what you have learned from the experience;
• Consider writing about experiences with your friends or relatives. What those events taught you?
• Introduction : Your growing up essay introduction is an opening paragraph of the work. It grabs a reader’s attention and contains a thesis statement.
• Body Paragraphs : The childhood and growing up essay can contain three body paragraphs. In each one, provide an example of an event or situation that supports the general topic.
• Conclusion : In your growing up essay, the conclusion is the final paragraph. It summarizes the main points and brings the paper to an end.
• Revise your draft a couple of days after writing it. That way, you will be able to notice mistakes or typos you missed.
• Try to avoid passive voice . Rewrite the sentences in an active one, if possible.
• Read your essay out loud. If it doesn’t meet the set criteria, keep revising it.

👩‍👦‍👦 Growing Up Essay Topics

You may not know what your essay on growing up should be devoted to. If it’s the case, look at this section. Earlier, we talked about how to write, but here we will tell you what to write about.

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See the topics that can navigate an essay about your childhood experience:

• Your family values and how they have been shaping your personality. Engage in reflective writing to show how certain factors of growing up influenced your character . What do you think were the effects of your growing-up period?
• What various roles have you had in your family? How and why did they change? As children grow, the family adjusts accordingly. Remember your roles as a child, adolescent, and young adult . How did they change?
• Your personal changes over the course of growing up . Write an essay describing your personal development . What caused those changes?
• Sudden adulthood . Write a “growing up too fast” essay. Reflect on your feelings and emotions about growing up so suddenly.
• Growing up with siblings . Write an essay about your childhood experience in a house where you weren’t the only child. Remember what it was like growing up with blood brothers and sisters? Or, maybe you have step-siblings? How did it influence you?
• A short memoir . You don’t need to have a dramatic adolescence or an out-of-ordinary story to write about yourself. Share your most exciting stories from childhood.
• A significant event from my childhood.
• Personal experience of parenting styles .
• Describe the events that helped you to learn about life .
• Tell about the time you tried to challenge gender norms .
• Analyze your experience of growing up in another culture and the influence it had on your adult life.
• Most memorable Christmas of my childhood.
• Discuss how the relationships with your parents influenced your growing up and character formation.
• Describe the experience of self-disclosure in your childhood and the consequences it had.
• How I used to cope with stress at high school .
• Write about your family trips and the effect they had on the relationships within your family.
• Analyze how the relationships with your peers impacted your growing up and adult life.
• How I learned to ride a bicycle .
• Examine how different teaching styles you’ve experienced in childhood influenced your growing up.

In other words, try to focus on something that made your growing up experience memorable and tell about it.

What if you do not feel like talking about your own experience in the essay on growing up? Do not worry. There are many other ways to complete your paper.

What follows next are additional ideas for you:

• Write essays on growing up based on a work of literature or songs . Choose your favorite piece of literature or a song that talks about growing up. Write several paragraphs about the portrayal of the growing up period in music or literature.
• Write essays on growing up with a single parent . Write an essay about growing up without a father or mother . What is it like? What impact can it make on a person’s character?
• Write about growing up without parents . A childhood spent in an orphanage or with distant relatives can have lasting consequences . Think about the effects it can have on a person’s character.
• Write an essay about growing up in a small town. Think about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small town . Why do you think it’s good or bad to live in a small town?
• Write about youth growing up fast. Children become adults quite quickly. Discuss the possible reasons for children to grow up faster.
• What happens to the mentally challenged children when they grow up?
• Examine how Nhuong depicted childhood in the book Water Buffalo Days: Growing Up in Vietnam .
• Discuss the changes digital technology brought into a growing-up process.
• Childhood’s effect on adulthood: the story of John Wayne Gacy .
• Explain how the environment influences the growing up and physical development of a child.
• Describe the relation between difficult childhood and personal development .
• Description of lost childhood in Night by E. Wiesel.
• Analyze the consequences being bullied or being a bully in childhood may have in adult life.
• Frank Conroy’s childhood in his book Stop-Time.
• Explore how childhood development and growing up shown in Born to Learn video .
• Examine the stories about coming of age and infantilism in literature.
• Discuss the peculiarities of growing up in multiracial family .
• Analyze the authors experience in Country Pride: What I Learned Growing Up in Rural America by Sarah Smarsh .
• Describe the problem of childhood obesity and the ways it influences children’s life.

👧 Growing Up Topics for College Essays

Writing a college essay about growing up essay is a great opportunity to reflect on the challenges and triumphs that made you who you are. Here are some compelling essay prompts and topics that will help you share your unique coming-of-age experience.

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• Essay on how growing up has shaped my life. Describe the pivotal moments from your upbringing that have had an impact on your personality and aspirations. You may also reflect on the lessons learned from your family, friends, community, and cultural surroundings. How did these experiences shape your values and worldview?
• What are the effects of growing up in poverty? Essays on this topic can explain how growing up in financially disadvantaged circumstances shapes people’s lives. If it’s something that resonates with you, you can write about it in your college essay. For example, describe the challenges you’ve faced and the experiences that have fostered your resilience. You can also analyze how these circumstances have impacted your values, such as a passion for social justice.
• What are the challenges of growing up? Consider the impact of family dynamics and cultural influences on your personal development. You can also discuss how overcoming these challenges has influenced you as a person and how it made you stronger.
• Is taking risks a necessary part of growing up? An essay on this topic can discuss the potential benefits and drawbacks of taking risks at a young age. Is taking risks an essential part of maturing and gaining independence, or are there other ways to learn? Remember to provide examples to illustrate your point.
• Fear of growing up. For this essay, consider how young people grapple with the challenges of transitioning to adulthood. What anxieties are associated with leaving behind the safety of childhood? Discuss the potential consequences of the fear of embracing adult responsibilities and provide real-life examples.
• Explain how peer influence shapes a person’s identity.
• The challenges of being the oldest sibling.
• How does one’s cultural background determine one’s childhood milestones?
• Social media and the coming-of-age experience.
• How education shapes a person’s future opportunities.
• The impact of childhood experiences on adult development.
• Explore the influence of gender identity on your journey to adulthood.
• The connection between your childhood hobby and adult career choice.
• The importance of self-discovery in the process of growing up.
• Write about the challenges and joys of adolescence.

📝 College Essay about Growing Up: Example

For your inspiration, we came up with a growing-up college essay example. It will provide insights into the content and structure and help you write an outstanding paper.

I have always been captivated by the world of art. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I have been experimenting with different forms of self-expression, such as painting and sketching.

As a child, I was fortunate to have a supportive family that nurtured my love for art. My mother enrolled me in an art class and was always ready to provide me with supplies. All this helped foster my creativity to the point where I decided to pursue an art education in college.

During my teenage years, I was surrounded by a diverse group of friends who shared my interests. We went to galleries, attended art events, and collaborated on projects. These friendships enriched my artistic perspective even further. They also taught me about the diversity of creativity and expression.

In addition to art, I have various hobbies that help me become better at what I do. In particular, I enjoy reading non-fiction about renowned artists. Aside from traditional art forms, I also experiment with photography and digital design.

My family and friends played a major role in my decision to pursue a career as a creative. Their support and my belief in the power of self-expression will help me contribute to our school and the whole community.

Thank you for reading this article! Hopefully, you found the information written here useful. If so, don’t forget to comment and share this article with your friends.

This might be interesting for you:

• School Days Essay: How to Describe a Memorable Event
• Childhood Memories Essay: Brilliant Writing Ideas
• Writing Essay about Someone Who Has Made an Impact on Your Life
• Excellent Remembering a Person Essay: Free Writing Guidelines
• Life Experience Essay: How to Write a Brilliant Paper
• Essays that Worked: Hamilton College
• Essay Growing Up: Bartleby
• Narrative Writing: Brigham Young University
• Reflection Essay: Kent State University
• My Childhood Memories Essay: Cram
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Growing up Faster, Feeling Older: Hardship in Childhood and Adolescence

Monica kirkpatrick johnson.

Washington State University

STEFANIE MOLLBORN

University of Colorado–Boulder

We examine whether hardship while growing up shapes subjective age identity, as well as three types of experiences through which it may occur. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that hardship in several domains during childhood and adolescence is associated with feeling relatively older and self-identifying as an adult in the late teens and twenties. Specifically, young people who as adolescents felt unsafe in their schools or neighborhoods, witnessed or were victims of violence, had fewer economic resources in the household, and lived in certain family structures, reported older subjective ages (by one or both measures). We find no evidence that hardship’s association with subjective age is mediated by work responsibilities in adolescence or by anticipating a very curtailed life span, but entering adult roles earlier mediates or partially mediates many of these relationships.

Sociologists recognize age as one of the most fundamental categories organizing social life ( Riley, Foner, and Waring 1988 ; Settersten and Mayer 1997 ). However subjective age is equally or more important than chronological age in many processes (e.g., Bowling et. al 2005 ; Montepare and Lachman 1989 ; Neugarten and Hagestad 1976 ). Subjective age captures self-perceptions of one’s age, often expressed in terms of relative age, such as how old one feels compared to others of the same chronological age, or the age group with which one identifies ( Settersten and Mayer 1997 ). Social science has recently witnessed a growing interest in the subjective side of aging during the early life course, including pseudomaturity in adolescence (e.g., Galambos et al. 1999 ; Greenberger and Steinberg 1986 ) and young people’s understanding of what it means to grow up and be an adult (e.g., Arnett 2000 ; Shanahan et al. 2005 ; Macmillan 2007 ).

In addition to interest in the cultural meaning attached to maturity and adult status, some of this newer research points to important variation in the pace of growing up. The idea that some children or adolescents grow up more quickly than others is not entirely new, however. The literatures on divorce and economic disadvantage both reveal themes of accelerated young lives. For example, Weiss (1979) suggested in the 1970s that divorce makes children “grow up a little faster,” and consistently, recent research indicates that young people in their late teens and twenties from married biological-parent families feel younger and are less likely to consider themselves adults than young people with other family structures ( Benson and Furstenberg 2007 ; Johnson, Berg, and Sirotizki 2007a , b ). Similarly, consistent with Elder’s (1974) characterization of adolescents’ lives in economically pressed families during the Great Depression, recent ethnographic accounts of poor inner-city youth suggest children and teenagers age into adulthood very quickly in these settings ( Burton, Obeidallah, and Allison 1996 ; Kotlowitz 1991 ). Family disruption and poverty, along with other conditions of deprivation or stress like feeling unsafe in daily life, represent key hardships implicated in subjective aging during the early life course.

We build on the foundation provided by these studies to better understand who grows up more quickly and why. We argue that hardships are linked to older subjective ages because they affect three bases of age identities, all of which are grounded in age-normative understandings of the life course: earlier timing of entry into age-graded roles, earlier assumption of responsibilities, and expectations for a shorter life span. We draw on nationally representative data from eighteen to twenty-six year olds in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine whether hardship experienced in several domains during childhood and adolescence is related to the sense of being older than one’s age peers and, for the youngest in our sample, identifying as an adult. We also examine whether these relationships operate through three types of mediating experiences consistent with our argument. Because identity shapes behavioral choice ( Stryker and Burke 2000 ), and this stage in the life course involves critical decisions affecting life trajectories of education, work, and family, it is important to understand influences on age identity in young people. Our research helps build an understanding of how the social contexts in which individuals grow up shape their identity. Our findings also contribute to important debates in the life-course tradition involving the import of adult role transitions and the nature of age-norms in contemporary society.

THE LIFE COURSE AND AGE IDENTITIES

As other life-course scholars have also done, we view subjective age identity, and identities more broadly, as part of the self-concept (e.g., George, Mutran, and Pennybacker 1980 ; Kaufman and Elder 2003 ). As such, it is part of one’s perception of oneself as an object, in this case a subjective assessment of one’s chronological age. The self-concept develops in interactions with others, particularly significant others, and is influenced by cultural, social structural, and historical forces ( Gecas and Burke 1995 ). Roles and other structural features of societies provide expectations that guide behavior in interaction and provide external, socially agreed-upon standards for comparison and evaluation.

Identity theory, arguably the dominant perspective on self and identity in sociological social psychology, specifically links the self to social structure via roles. Indeed, the theory defines identities as internalized role expectations, or, alternatively, the meanings people attach to the many roles they play ( Stryker and Burke 2000 ). MacMillan (2007) notes that this dominant conceptualization, and subsequent research foci, have left several gaps in knowledge of identities to date. First, he notes that many of the roles in which identities are based are age-graded, and that normative timetables for the life course indicate the appropriate timing of major role transitions. These social aspects of aging are a product of culture, varying historically and across subgroups, making up an important part of the “meanings” people attach to roles. As Settersten and Mayer (1997) observe, age, along with sex, is the primary source of variation in social and cultural expectations for life experiences and roles. Societies are age-structured, and Macmillan’s critique reflects the underacknowledged role of age-related expectations and meanings involved in identity processes. In addition, Macmillan (2007) points out that roles “aggregate to define particular life stages and serve in an almost taken for granted manner as the master statuses of one’s identity” (2007:15). Internalized expectations for what it means to be a child, adolescent, or adult are therefore crucial to identity.

Among these expectations are age norms that prescribe appropriate behavior for someone in a particular life stage. The contemporary Western view of childhood has been called a “sentimental perspective” for its understanding of children as priceless, innocent, and in need of protection ( Best 1990 ). This view idealizes happy, carefree childhoods. Cultural constructions of childhood thus entail expectations of both innocence and freedom from adult responsibilities, roles, or burdens, and these notions take the form of age norms. Childhood, and to a good extent adolescence, are also organized around a norm of dependence ( Macmillan 2007 ). Again, this limits adolescents’ responsibilities and puts parameters on adolescents’ relationships to parents or those on whom they depend.

Although movement in and out of roles across the life course has been acknowledged as important (e.g., Wells and Stryker 1988 ), very little work (inside or outside of identity theory) takes on these life-course themes and their implications for identity. We gain leverage in understanding age identities by taking the role-based conceptualization of identities from identity theory, but also by adding consideration of these internalized age-related cultural expectations. 1 Specifically, we argue that violating age norms for childhood and adolescence challenges the child or adolescent identity and accelerates subjective aging. A young person’s understanding of herself as relatively older (or younger) emerges as she perceives that her experience violates age norms for someone her age. We focus on three (non-exhaustive) types of age-norm violations through which young people develop older age identities: assuming adult social roles, accumulating the responsibilities and performing the tasks of an adult, and anticipating a highly curtailed life span (i.e., an early death). We begin by discussing these three types of experiences and then complete the circle by returning to articulate how specific forms of hardship accelerate subjective aging through them.

Behavior and age identity are likely reciprocally related across the full life course. While we focus on the effects of hardship on age identity through a process in which engaging in non-normatively older behaviors lead to older age identities, it is possible that there is actually a bidirectional relationship involved whereby those with older age identities also engage in behaviors considered normative for older ages. Because our primary interest is in building an understanding of how hardship fosters growing up faster, we focus on the ways behavior and experience can affect identity in this study.

Earlier Assumption of Age-graded Roles

Consistent with the conceptualization of identities in identity theory, we expect that identities are based in social roles. Importantly, many roles are age-graded, and studies confirm that age identities are grounded in the age-graded social roles that make up the life course, including parent, grandparent, and retiree ( George 1990 ; Logan, Ward, and Spitze 1992 ; Neugarten 1977 ). Age-related cultural meaning attached to roles provides a reference point in understanding one’s age. Being a grandparent is something “older” people do. In fact, transitioning to roles such as grandparent earlier than others is associated with older subjective ages ( Kaufman and Elder 2003 ).

With respect to the adolescent and young adult life course, earlier entry into the “adult” roles of marriage, parenthood, full-time work, and living independently from parents should, accordingly, foster older subjective ages. Compared to others of one’s chronological age, those who have transitioned into these roles should feel older, and recent studies confirm this expectation ( Benson and Furstenberg 2007 ; Johnson et al. 2007a ; Foster, Hagan, and Brooks-Gunn 2008 ). Occupying these roles is often inconsistent with an understanding of oneself as a child or adolescent.

The meaning of adult social roles in the life course is subject to much debate, however, particularly given growing variability in the timing and configuration of these roles ( Fussell and Furstenberg 2005 ). Normative timetables for adult role transitions are historically variable and may also be weaker now than they have been for some time. Many scholars argue that the life course has become more individualized ( Buchmann 1989 ), with fewer normative and institutional constraints and more opportunities to chart one’s own path. Overall delays in family formation have been combined with frequent movement back and forth between school and work and between living independently and in the parental home ( Shanahan 2000 ).

In this context, Arnett (2000) has argued that role transitions are no longer used as criteria for defining adulthood, and his studies show that very few people of any age indicate that traditional role transitions like marriage and parenthood are necessary for young people to achieve adult status. Instead, he argues, it is the development of adult personal qualities like responsibility that now define adulthood in contemporary Western societies. Yet, research by Furstenberg et al. (2003) indicates that key adult roles (e.g., completing school, achieving financial independence, working full-time, and establishing an independent household) are viewed as important markers in considering someone an adult. Additionally, evidence of age-based expectations for transitions to adulthood exists in violations that occur at very late or very early ages, as demonstrated by Settersten (1998) in failing to leave home and Mollborn (2007) in teenage pregnancy. Thus we expect that young people who have made transitions to adult social roles will report older subjective age identities.

Earlier Assumption of Responsibilities

Those who have argued for the continued relevance of adult role transitions in marking adulthood have also endorsed the idea that adulthood is marked by qualities of character such as responsibility ( Shanahan et al. 2005 ; Johnson et al. 2007a ). Indeed, responsibility for self ( Arnett 2000 ), or self and others ( Pallas 2007 ; Andrew et al. 2007 ; Macmillan 2007 ), is emerging as one of the key themes in current research on what it means to grow up and become an adult.

When children and adolescents take on a level of responsibility that is understood as more typical for those at older ages, they are likely to see themselves as older than their age peers. And in taking on adult responsibilities, young people begin to feel like adults. Certain responsibilities during childhood and adolescence can be expected to challenge cultural understandings of these life stages as relatively carefree and dependent upon others. These could include taking on significant responsibility in child or elder care or in household management and housework. It could also include taking on adult-like paid work responsibilities, becoming financially independent, or making financial contributions to support others. Though there is little extant research on the subject, Benson and Furstenberg (2007) show levels of both household and financial responsibilities in late adolescence are associated with identifying as an adult at age 21 in a predominantly working poor and working-class sample. Thus we expect that young people who held greater responsibilities as adolescents will report older subjective age identities.

Perceived Location in the Life Span

Another basis for age identities may lie in perceptions of where one is located in the life span. Research finds that subjective aging during midlife involves facing one’s own mortality and a reorientation toward time in which one begins to think of one’s life as time left rather than time since birth ( Neugarten 1968 ). This suggests that perhaps subjective age can become a measure of nearness to the end of life rather than time since it began. Those who look toward the future and see a sharply curtailed life course may feel older than others their age.

Most research on this process has focused on midlife and beyond. Yet any significant sense of being near the end of one’s life during childhood and adolescence violates dominant normative timetables that assume living into old age and should also accelerate subjective aging. Those facing life-threatening risks in childhood and adolescence do report feeling older and that they grew up quickly ( Burton et al. 1996 ; Parry and Chesler 2005 ). Thus we expect that young people who anticipate a sharply curtailed life span will report older subjective age identities.

HARDSHIP AND SUBJECTIVE AGE

Having identified several bases for understanding accelerated subjective aging during childhood and adolescence, we now return to the question of why hardship during this period in the life course might be linked to growing up faster in terms of subjective age. We argue that hardships foster older age identities because they tend to propel children and adolescents toward experiences that challenge cultural norms about childhood and adolescence. In this section we discuss three forms of hardship during the early life course with a focus on how older subjective ages develop through the processes we have identified above.

By considering multiple forms of hardship, we can assess common and disparate experiences to the benefit of theory development. The three hardships on which we focus, family disruption, poverty, and living with violence and fear for one’s safety, are also interrelated. The highest rate of poverty, for example, occurs among single-mother families ( U.S. Census Bureau 2007 ), and rates of witnessing or experiencing violence during adolescence are inversely related to household income ( Crouch et al. 2000 ). Our simultaneous consideration allows us to evaluate whether they also have independent effects.

Each hardship can be understood in a rich literature to which we cannot do justice in this brief discussion. For example, Amato’s (2000) review of research on divorce shows how both the severity and duration of consequences for children are affected by children’s own coping skills, the degree of social support they receive, parental conflict and adjustment, as well as factors of gender, age, and custody arrangements. Similarly, what poverty means for children’s lives depends on its duration and timing in the life course as well as parenting strategies and families’ ecological locations with respect to services and the resources of schools and neighborhoods ( Seccombe 2000 ). Although mindful of this complexity, we focus our discussion rather narrowly on how these hardships can be related to the earlier acquisition of responsibilities, earlier transitions to adult roles, and anticipating a sharply curtailed life span.

Family Structure

Family structure in childhood and adolescence may affect subjective aging because it is linked to responsibilities in the family as well as the timing of entry into adult roles. In his classic piece that first suggested that some youth grow up faster, Weiss (1979 :101) argued that children in single-parent homes grow up faster because they often became “junior partners” in household management. This often meant doing more housework and taking on higher levels of responsibility compared to children in married-parent families. Consistent with this argument, studies have shown that children and adolescents in single-parent families do more housework on average than those in married biological-parent families, with those in stepfamilies falling in between (Cooney and Mortimer 2000; Goldscheider and Waite 1991 ). If children and adolescents in certain family structures perceive that they do housework and have other responsibilities that are more normative for older ages, they may develop older age identities.

Family structure is also related to the average timing of certain adult role transitions, including a tendency to leave home earlier among children in a variety of family patterns other than those headed by married biological parents (e.g., Cooney and Mortimer 2000; Aquilino 1991 ). On average, young people from single-parent and step-parent families leave school earlier, experience their first sex earlier, are more likely to experience a pre-marital birth, and form unions earlier than those from intact married families (e.g., Musick and Bumpass 1999 ). Role performance in “adult” statuses is inconsistent with cultural expectations for childhood and adolescence. Through participating in adult role relationships and being treated as an adult, the young person begins to feel more like an adult.

Poverty and Low Socioeconomic Status

Economic hardship is also likely to accelerate subjective aging through the earlier assumption of responsibilities and earlier movement into adult roles. For many youth, economic hardship involves what Elder ([1974]1999) calls a “downward extension of adultlike experience,” including increased contributions to the family via household or paid labor. Young people from lower income families also take on heavier work loads outside the home, working longer hours at paid jobs ( Mortimer 2003 ). Middle-class youth are also often employed, but they are less likely to work at high intensities of 20 hours per week or more and less likely to work in higher earning, more stressful, adult-like jobs ( Mortimer 2003 ). Poor youth are also more likely to give part of their wages to family members or pay for expenses that parents would cover under better economic circumstances ( Newman 1999 ). Shouldering a level of financial responsibility that is more normative for older ages, and more consistent with conceptions of adulthood, may foster a sense of being older, or grown up, at younger ages.

Burton and colleagues’ (1996) research on poor, inner-city, minority families illustrates this process well. They note that at young ages, children and adolescents are often treated as adults in their families. One young man from this study, clearly conveying the adult-like level of responsibility he shoulders, explains how inconsistent the role expectations he faces in school are from his family experience:

Sometimes I just don’t believe how this school operates and thinks about us. Here I am a grown man. I take care of my mother and have raised my sisters. Then I come here and this know-nothing teacher treats me like I’m some dumb kid with no responsibilities. I am so frustrated. They are trying to make me something that I am not. Don’t they understand I am a man and I been a man longer than they been a woman?

Burton (1990) argues that among very poor minorities, an accelerated timetable for the life course has become normative in response to environmental constraints. This suggests that these young people age faster, and feel adult earlier, than other young people. Yet, as evident in this young man’s frustration, they still bump up against society’s dominant age norms in their daily life. Larger cultural conceptions of childhood and adolescence are embedded into relationships at schools, are portrayed in mass media, and so on. Any disjuncture between local and dominant timetables could heighten the feeling of being older.

In addition to their higher level of responsibilities in their natal families, youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds also experience more accelerated transitions into adult roles ( Buchmann 1989 ; Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1999 ). Normative timetables seem to reflect this behavioral pattern. Less educated and less affluent people expect that individuals should move through the sociodemographic transitions of adulthood, especially marriage and parenthood, at earlier ages than do others ( Furstenberg et al. 2003 ; Settersten 2003 ). This may occur in part because socioeconomic status is positively associated with life expectancy. Geronimus (1996) , for example, argues that low-income black women face accelerated physical aging and shorter life spans compared to middle-class and affluent women, even during the young adult years, such that infant health outcomes are better when mothers give birth in their teens compared to older ages. But we do not expect that low socioeconomic status affects subjective aging through anticipating a highly curtailed life span (i.e., expecting death in adolescence or young adulthood) in the way we do for the final hardship we consider, experiencing violence and lacking safety.

Safety and Violence

Violence and lack of safety in one’s daily life can accelerate subjective aging by altering perceptions of where one is in the life span and by pushing young people into more adult-like responsibilities. When young people witness or experience violence and fear for their safety in their daily lives, it can raise the possibility (and sometimes the reality) of the end of one’s life being nearer. One seventeen-year-old high-school senior in Burton et al.’s (1996) study balked, “Me, a teenager? Be for real, lady. Who’s got time for that? I’m a man. I’d better be one before I lose my life out on these streets.” Kotlowitz’s (1991) interviews and observations in Chicago housing projects present similar themes. Youthful aspirations were couched in terms of “if I grow up” rather than “when.”

The harshness of these experiences may also contribute to adult-like decision-making, responsibilities, and stresses. Kotlowitz (1991 :xi) writes:

By the time they enter adolescence, they have contended with more terror than most of us confront in a lifetime. They have had to make choices that most experienced and educated adults would find difficult. They have lived with fear and witnessed death.

Confronting death and living in fear challenge the very notion of childhood ( Kotlowitz 1991 ), and thus those who feel unsafe and who experience non-normative levels of violence growing up should age more quickly in subjective terms.

Data and Sample

This research uses data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (see SPQ website for additional information on Add Health, www.asanet.org/spq ). Add Health began as a nationally representative study of American adolescents in grades 7–12 from 134 middle and high schools in 80 communities in 1994–1995. An in-school questionnaire was followed by in-home interviews with a subsample of students and one parent or parent-like figure in 1995 (Wave I) and with the adolescents again in 1996 (Wave II) and 2001–2002 (Wave III). The original sampling was conducted with a stratified design in which schools were selected from a complete list of American high schools based on their region, urbanicity, school type (public vs. private), racial composition, and size. Each of the selected high schools was matched to a school that fed into it, with the probability of the feeder school being selected proportional to its contribution to the high school’s student body. We weighted all analyses and used survey analysis techniques to adjust for the complex sample design (see Chantala and Tabor 1999 ).

We use data collected in Waves I and III and restrict our analysis to those respondents participating in both waves who were assigned a sampling weight. We further restrict our analyses to those who were under age 19 at the first wave to exclude students with non-normative ages for high school, and those who reported dramatically inconsistent ages at Wave I and III, resulting in 13,868 eligible cases. Of these cases, 4.6 percent were omitted because of missing data, resulting in an analysis sample of 13,230. For reasons described below, part of our analyses draw only on data from respondents ages 22 and under at Wave III.

Respondents were asked questions on their subjective age identity for the first time in Wave III (ages 18–26), so our dependent variables are taken then. Our measures of hardship were all taken from Wave I, and our measures of mediating experiences come from both Waves I and III. Older age identities may emerge close in time to when hardship is experienced and persist into young adulthood. When the subjective aging process speeds up or skips ahead, young people are likely to continue to feel older even if the pace of aging returns to that comparable with age peers after hardship abates. Young people may also continue to feel older relative to peers because circumstances surrounding the hardship persist, or because they continue to draw on a repertoire of adult-like behaviors learned under hardship conditions when those conditions change. Precedent for similar long-term social psychological effects exists; Mirowsky and Ross (2000) found that economic hardship reduced subjective life expectancy by several years even if decades had passed since the tough times. Although we assume that older subjective ages among those experiencing hardship in childhood and adolescence may be evident at earlier ages, we cannot test this assumption. We evaluate whether such young people have older subjective ages several years later, at a time when they are making the transition to adulthood.

Subjective age

Our measurement strategy follows closely from our theoretical concerns. Our interest is in feeling relatively older rather than in the full range of subjective ages. What might drive a distinction between feeling younger or about the same as one’s age peers would not necessarily parallel our discussion of how hardship promotes growing up faster. We therefore dichotomized responses to a question in Wave III which asked respondents, “In general, how old do you feel compared with others your age?” to contrast those who felt “older all of the time” (17 percent) with those who did not (83 percent; four original categories ranging from “older most of the time” to “younger all of the time”). 2

We also examine how often young people feel like an adult as a second indicator of subjective age. Unlike our first measure, feeling like an adult could mean feeling older or not, depending on the age one is. We therefore examine feeling adult only for our younger respondents, those eighteen to twenty-two years old. Thus, this dependent variable captures feeling adult at reasonably young ages. Any specific age cutoff would be somewhat arbitrary, but we selected age 22 to maintain a sufficient sample size and because it approximates a culturally ideal end to the “college-age” years, even among those young people who do not attend college. As we do for relative age, we dichotomize this measure, contrasting those who felt like an adult “all of the time” (37 percent of those aged 18–22) with those who felt like an adult less often (63 percent; four original categories ranging from “never” to “most of the time”).

Although both these indicators of subjective age are single-item measures and limited as a result, previous research with this data shows that both are related in predictable and meaningful ways to measures of independence, maturity, and role behaviors, such as financial independence, leaving school, starting full-time work, and family formation ( Johnson et al. 2007a , b ; see also Benson and Furstenberg 2007 ). And our confidence is bolstered by examining two aspects of subjective age—relative age and self-perceived adulthood.

Our dependent variables are conceptualized as dichotomous, but the measures on which we drew were ordinal. Supplemental models using ordinal logit might have been appropriate for purposes of comparison, but the proportional odds assumption was not met for either ordinal dependent variable. For comparison purposes we instead estimated binary logit models with different cutoff points. Instead of comparing “all of the time” to all other responses for the measures of feeling older and feeling adult, we compared “all” and “most of the time” to other responses. Out of the respondents, 59 percent felt older most or all of the time; 71 percent of those aged 18–22 felt adult most or all of the time. We discuss the differences that arise under these specifications after we report the findings with our original cutoffs.

Similar to the dependent variables, the very notion of hardship suggests one end, rather than a continuous distribution, of experience. As such, we measured hardship with dichotomous or categorical indicators to capture this distributional end. We examined family structure in adolescence using Harris’s (1999) coding scheme, measured in five categories, distinguishing married biological-parent families, single-mother families, single-father families, other two-parent families (largely stepfamilies), and other family structures. Based on prior research primarily in the area of household and family responsibilities, we expect subjective age to be highest in single-parent families, followed by stepfamilies, with those in married biological-parent families having the youngest subjective ages. Because the “other family structure” category includes a diversity of structures, we do not have a specific hypothesis about its effects on subjective age.

We measured economic hardship through a series of dummy variables that calculate household income during adolescence as a percentage of 1994 federal poverty thresholds (0–100 percent, 101–200 percent, 201–300 percent, 301–400 percent, and greater than 400 percent), which account for the number of people in the household. An additional variable indicates respondents who were missing income information.

To measure perceived lack of safety, we combined adolescent reports of whether they usually feel safe in their neighborhood (yes or no) and at their school (strongly agree to strongly disagree). Adolescents who answered “no” to feeling safe in their neighborhood and/or strongly disagreed that they felt safe at school were coded as feeling unsafe. To measure violence exposure, we combined reports of whether adolescents witnessed or experienced violence. Adolescents were asked how many times during the past 12 months a series of things happened (“you saw someone shoot or stab another person,” “someone pulled a knife or gun on you,” “someone shot you,” “someone cut or stabbed you,” and “you were jumped”). The original responses included 0, 1, or 2 (for more than once). We summed responses across the five items and distinguished adolescents with minimal exposure to violence (0 – 1) from those with greater exposure (2 – 10). We selected this threshold based on the severity and infrequency of the violence referenced in these items.

We expected hardship to operate through three types of mediating experiences, including transitioning into adult roles earlier than one’s age peers, having had a lot of early responsibilities, and perceiving one’s life expectancy as severely curtailed. Measures of adult role transitions were obtained from Wave III. The transition markers included whether the respondent was out of school (1 = not in school; 0 = currently attending school), working full-time (1 = working 35 or more hours per week; 0 = working fewer than 35 hours per week), living away from the familial home (1 = not living with parents or relatives; 0 = living with parents or relatives), married or cohabiting (1 = currently married or cohabiting; 0 = not married or cohabiting), and had one or more children (1 = parent; 0 = not a parent). 3

With respect to heavy responsibilities, we were able to tap into the specific forms of household and paid-work responsibilities. We believe there are other relevant responsibilities (e.g., caretaking, financial responsibility) to which we return in the discussion. We dichotomized a measure of adolescents’ Wave I reports of their involvement in housework in the past week to distinguish those who were involved almost daily (five or more times, the top response category) with other adolescents. While “daily” housework may not be statistically or socially non-normative, more frequent or heavier involvement in housework was not captured in the measure we have available. As a result, we may underestimate the effects of heavy housework. Because research has shown that 20 or more hours of paid work during adolescence is an important approximate threshold for excessive work involvement ( National Research Council 1998 ), we distinguished adolescents who reported in Wave I typically working 20 or more hours per week during the school year from those working fewer hours or not at all. Employment at this intensity is more adult-like and we expect it captures heavier responsibility. We also examined whether the effect of housework and paid work on subjective age was stronger for younger respondents based on the assumption that our measures would better capture violations of age norms at Wave I for the younger respondents.

Our measures of anticipating a shorter life span were based on responses to two questions in Wave I: whether adolescents expected to be living at age 35 and whether they expected to be killed by 21. Because they represent conceptually distinct processes, we kept these as separate indicators in our models and in each case distinguished those who expected death (a 50–50 chance or less of being alive at age 35 and a 50–50 chance or greater of being killed by 21). 4

We also controlled for chronological age, gender, race/ethnicity (Hispanic/Latino, non-Latino white, non-Latino Black/African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/American Indian, and “other race,” with respondents identifying as multiracial asked to choose a primary racial identity), nativity, parents’ education level, and residential mobility, all of which have been linked to subjective age as well as to our independent variables of interest ( Benson and Furstenberg 2007 ; Galambos, Turner, and Tilton-Weaver 2005 ; Johnson et al. 2007a , b ; Montepare and Lachman 1989 ; Shanahan et al. 2005 ). With the exception of chronological age, which reflected age reported at Wave III, these variables were measured at Wave I. Each was reported by the adolescent, except for nativity and parents’ education, which were based on adolescent reports only when parent reports were missing. Parents’ education was measured by the average years of schooling of residential parent(s). We converted the original ordinal scale to years of education (no school = 0, 8th grade or less = 8, some high school = 10, trade/vocational or business school instead of high school = 11, graduated high school = 12, trade/vocational or business school after high school = 13, some college = 14, college degree = 16, and graduate or professional training = 18). We measured residential stability in Wave I as the duration since last move in years.

Descriptive statistics on the study measures appear in Table 1 . Consistent with our expectations, each type of hardship was significantly associated with both feeling relatively older and, for those aged 18–22, feeling adult. Those with older subjective ages were less likely to be living with both biological parents in adolescence and were disproportionately from poor or near-poor families. Those with older subjective ages also disproportionately felt unsafe and experienced higher levels of violence in adolescence.

Weighted Means and Proportions for Variables used in Analyzing Older Subjective Age, Overall and by Values of the Dependent Variables

Source: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (1995). N = 13,230 for feeling older; 7,863 for feeling adult.

Analyses correct for complex survey design (stratification and clustering).

The measures of potential mediating experiences were also related to feeling relatively older and feeling adult as expected. Those with older subjective ages as young adults had been engaged in more frequent housework and more paid work than other adolescents. Those with older subjective ages were also less likely as adolescents to have expected to live to 35 and were more likely to have expected to be killed by 21. Finally, by Wave III they were more likely to have made each of the adult role transitions (parenthood, living on one’s own, not being a student, marriage/cohabitation, and full-time work).

Several sociodemographic variables were also related to feeling relatively older and feeling adult. Those who felt older and adult all of the time were less likely to be white or Asian and more likely to be black. They were also disproportionately from families with less-educated parents and who had moved more recently. Chronological age, gender, and nativity were not associated with feeling older, but older respondents, women, and native-born respondents were more likely to report feeling adult.

We examined our hypotheses about hardship and the processes through which it shapes subjective age in a series of logistic regression models shown in Table 2 for both dependent variables. Model 1 includes only the control variables. Transforming the regression coefficients to odds ratios (e b ) indicates that blacks were 51 percent more likely to feel older (e .41 = 1.51) and (among eighteen to twenty-two year olds) 79 percent more likely to feel adult (e .58 =1.79) compared with whites. Older respondents, those from families with less-educated parents, and those who had experienced more recent residential moves were also more likely to feel older and adult all the time. Additional control variables predicted feeling adult but not feeling older, including being female, being white compared to Latino, and being US-born.

Binary Logistic Regression of Subjective Age on Hardship and Potential Mediators

Reference categories:

We introduced the hardship measures in Model 2. 5 With respect to the family, living in other two-parent families, living with a single mother, or living in “other” family structures during Wave I increased the likelihood of feeling older in Wave III by 25 percent, 38 percent, and 55 percent, respectively. In terms of feeling adult, these increased likelihoods were 35 percent for other two-parent families and 60 percent for “other” family structures, but living with a single mother was not significant. The coefficient for single father was quite close to that for “other two-parent families” (the category dominated by stepfamilies), but did not reach statistical significance, owing in part to its smaller size. When economic hardship is considered without the other hardship domains, the two poorest income categories significantly predicted feeling older compared to the highest category (supplemental model not shown), but in Model 2 the only significant income difference was that respondents from 100–200 percent of the poverty line were 27 percent more likely to feel adult than those from the highest income category. We found through estimating several additional models (not shown), which considered the indicators of hardship singly and in combination, that adolescent family structure accounted for the relationship between economic hardship and feeling older. Feeling unsafe as an adolescent also predicted feeling older in young adulthood, as did experience of violence, increasing the likelihood of feeling older by 58 percent and 62 percent respectively. For feeling adult, only exposure to violence was significant, raising the likelihood by 40 percent. For both subjective age measures, “other family structures” compared to two-biological-parent families and experience of violence (as well as feeling unsafe for feeling older only) had the largest effects of all the hardship measures.

Several of the control variables’ effects were attenuated with the introduction of these hardship measures in Model 2. Most notably, the coefficients for non-Latino black were reduced significantly. Reductions were also evident for chronological age, parental education, nativity, and residential mobility.

Model 3 examines whether the effects of hardship were mediated by adolescents’ involvement in frequent housework or intensive paid work, anticipating a curtailed life course, and making adult role transitions. Frequent housework in adolescence predicted feeling adult and feeling older in young adulthood, and intensive paid work predicted feeling older in young adulthood. But because supplemental analyses (see supplemental tables provided at SPQ website, www.asanet.org/spq ) show that adding only these variables to Model 2 did not significantly reduce the size of any of the hardship coefficients, they did not mediate any of the estimated hardship effects. We examined whether the effects of housework and paid work were stronger for younger sample members, but interaction terms were not statistically significant (not shown). Neither measure of expecting a very curtailed life course predicted subjective age in the multivariate models and therefore did not mediate any of the hardship effects.

Experiencing some types of adult role transitions by Wave III, however, was not only strongly associated with having an older subjective age, but also mediated some of the hardship effects (see Baron and Kenny 1986 for a discussion of mediation criteria). 6 Having a child, not being a student, and being married or cohabiting predicted both feeling older and feeling adult. Living on one’s own only predicted feeling older, while being a full-time worker only predicted feeling adult. Among the role transitions, marriage/cohabitation had the largest effect on feeling older, while parenthood had the largest effect on feeling adult. Among the hardship and role transition measures in Model 3, feeling unsafe had a larger effect than any of the role transitions on feeling older, but the effect of parenthood was largest on feeling adult; indeed, none of the hardship measures significantly predicted feeling adult once role transitions and the other potential mediators were included.

In conjunction with supplemental analyses (see note 6 and Model 3 of supplemental table A2 provided at SPQ website), the analyses show that the significant effects of hardships from each of the three domains were fully mediated by role transitions: “other” family structures for both dependent variables, “other two-parent family” structures for feeling older only, and 100–200 percent of the poverty line and experience of violence for feeling adult only. 7 The associations of having a single mother and experience of violence with feeling older were partially mediated by role transitions, and “other two-parent family” structures were partially mediated by feeling adult. 8 Of the hardships that were significant in Model 2, only the effect of feeling unsafe on feeling older was not at least partially mediated by role transitions. It is also notable that the effects of chronological age, gender, and nativity on feeling adult were substantially mediated in Model 3, as were the effects of parental education on both measures of subjective age.

Of course, hardship is not randomly distributed across the population; rather, it tends to be compounded. In bivariate analyses, respondents who experienced one category of hardship were significantly more likely to have experienced each other type of hardship (all p <.001; not shown). The cumulative effects of hardship across domains are evident in Figure 1 , in which we present the predicted probabilities of feeling older and feeling adult all the time for different hypothetical respondents. While experience with each type of hardship was positively associated with experiencing each other type, there was no small number of prevalent combinations of hardships which we could use to portray predicted probabilities. Instead, we illustrate the compounding effect by introducing each dimension of hardship and building on previous ones. The first set of predictions is based on Model 2, which includes all hardship measures. In these predictions, we set the value of continuous measures to their mean and categorical measures to their mode. We manipulated the values of several hardship measures systematically.

Notes: The first 5 predictions are based on Table 2 , Model 2.

The “advantaged” hypothetical respondent has no hardships (for household income we selected > 400% of poverty line) and average or modal values for other variables. The last 2 predictions are based on Table 2 , Model 3. The hypothetical respondent is the same as immediately previous (other 2-parent family, poor, unsafe and violence exposure, and otherwise “average”). “Other 2-parent family” means living with two parents, but both are not biological parents.

At the far left, we present the predicted probability of feeling older for an advantaged hypothetical respondent whose household income was in the highest category, who had two biological parents in the household, and did not feel unsafe or experience violence (with average values for all other variables). This scenario represents a very common pattern for respondents, 48 percent of whom did not experience any type of hardship. This hypothetical respondent had a low predicted probability of feeling older all the time at Wave III, at 0.12 (or a 12 percent likelihood of feeling older). His predicted probability of feeling adult all the time was 0.35, or a 35 percent likelihood of feeling adult. In comparison, 17 percent of all respondents felt older all the time and 37 percent felt adult all the time (weighted means).

The effect of changing the hypothetical respondent’s family from two biological parents to another type of two-parent family (these were mostly stepfamilies) is shown next, increasing the probability of feeling older to 0.14 and of feeling adult to 0.42. Keeping that change in family structure and manipulating the hypothetical respondent’s Wave I household income to below the poverty line raised these predicted probabilities to 0.18 and 0.46 respectively. Retaining these values and adding both feeling unsafe in one’s neighborhood or school and being exposed to violence doubled the predicted probability of feeling older, to 0.36, while the predicted probability of feeling adult rose to 0.57. These predictions demonstrate that the effects of hardship on subjective age are cumulative across domains. As hardships compounded across the figure, the predicted probability of feeling older tripled and the predicted probability of feeling adult increased by 63 percent.

For the second comparison in Figure 1 , we used Model 3 from Table 2 and manipulated the number of adult role transitions made by a hypothetical respondent who has experienced hardship across all domains. When he experienced no adult role transitions, his predicted probabilities of feeling older and feeling adult were 0.17 and 0.30, respectively, compared to 0.40 and 0.70 when he made all five transitions.

Sensitivity Analysis

Although our interest was in those with the oldest subjective ages (i.e., those who felt older or adult “all of the time”), we assessed whether our findings would change by altering the cut-off and including “most of the time” in our older subjective age category; we summarize the differences here (tables are available from the authors). For the analysis of feeling older in Table 2 , hardship results differed in that the other two-parent family coefficient was not fully mediated in Model 3. The household income effects were also stronger. The 100–200 percent and 200–300 percent of poverty threshold coefficients were significant in Model 2, and they were reduced but remained significant in Model 3. So while below-poverty incomes are associated with feeling older “most” and “all the time” only through their association with family structure, incomes in the two categories just above the poverty line are associated with older relative age independent of family structure when we consider those who feel older most or all of the time. Feeling unsafe was not significantly related to feeling older in either model, indicating its relevance only for those with the oldest relative ages. There were also two changes in the effects of the adult role transitions. Those working full-time were more likely to feel older most or all of the time though they were not more likely to feel older all of the time, and student status was no longer predictive of subjective age when we considered feeling older most or all of the time.

For the analysis of feeling adult in Table 2 , the combination of “most” and “all” of the time represented 71 percent of the sample. Hardship findings differed in that “other two-parent family” structures and experience of violence remained significant predictors of feeling adult in Model 3 rather than being fully mediated by adult role transitions. The single-mother family coefficient was significant in Model 2, but as with the other coding scheme, it was not significant in Model 3. Household incomes at 100–200 percent of the poverty line and “other” family structures were not significantly associated with feeling adult in Model 2. In Model 3, housework and student status were not significant.

The process of growing up, and aging more broadly, varies in pace across individuals. We combine insights from the life-course perspective, which draws our attention to age norms, the age-grading of roles, and how life stages can serve as master statuses, with existing conceptualizations of identity to understand individuals’ subjective understanding of age. What we argue and find in this study has implications for understanding age identities as well as identities more broadly, and contributes to several important life-course debates.

The current study generally supports our argument that hardship in childhood and adolescence fosters an older subjective age in early adulthood. There were certainly variations in the effects of hardship in the family, economic, and safety/violence domains across the two indicators of older subjective age and by their operationalization, but indicators within each of these domains predict older subjective age within at least one and often more than one of these specifications. These hardships share a challenge to contemporary cultural expectations for childhood or adolescence that lead to the sense that one is older than one’s age peers. We do not measure those age-related expectations directly, but instead identify a set of experiences we hypothesize are age non-normative, each stemming from one or more hardships. We grouped these age non-normative experiences into three (non-exhaustive) types, including transitioning into adult roles earlier than one’s age peers, having had a lot of early responsibilities, and perceiving one’s life expectancy as highly curtailed.

Respondents who had made adult role transitions held older subjective ages than those who had not yet done so. Partnering, becoming a parent, and completing one’s education predicted feeling older and adult all of the time. Establishing an independent household was also important to feeling older, and working full-time was important for feeling adult all of the time. In terms of taking on responsibilities, frequent housework in adolescence was associated with feeling older and feeling adult and intensive paid work in adolescence was associated with feeling older. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, anticipating a sharply curtailed life span during adolescence was not associated with an older subjective age in multivariate models. Previous consideration of this process has focused on older populations. It may be that nearness to the end of life only shapes subjective age in middle and late adulthood, when physical decline from age and specific health conditions serve as a constant reminder of one’s mortality.

Of these three types of experiences, only with respect to adult role transitions did we find evidence of mediation. All but one of the significant hardships were either fully or partially mediated by role transitions. The effects of hardships on feeling adult were mediated somewhat more strongly than on feeling older. The introduction of role transitions and high-intensity paid work also mediated several of the control variables, including gender, parents’ education, nativity, and residential stability. It is interesting to note that the effect of chronological age on feeling older is fully mediated by hardship (though the coefficient changes little until role transitions, housework, and high-intensity paid work are added), and the effect of chronological age on feeling adult is partially mediated (55 percent of the effect) by role transitions and housework. In other words, social processes account for most or all of the effect of chronological age on subjective age identity, as many social scientists working in this area would expect.

Our analyses of the hypothesized mediation processes were limited in two important ways that need to be addressed in future research. First, we lacked measures of very high levels of involvement in housework, and of financial responsibilities, contributing income to the family, and significant involvement in caring for siblings or older family members that may mediate the effects of hardship we observe. Second, subjective age was only measured at one time-point in our study, and as a result, we cannot know whether the responsibilities and roles we examine precede older age identities. For example, high-intensity employment in adolescence or early entry into adult roles could be more common among those who already felt older. Longitudinal measures would enable researchers to address this possibility and examine the extent to which behaving in an “older” fashion and having an older subjective age may be reciprocally linked over time.

Our consideration of age-related cultural expectations and examination of the case of age identities also advances our understanding of identities more broadly. Identity theory ( Stryker and Burke 2000 ), which encapsulates the primary scholarship on identities in contemporary sociological social psychology, conceptualizes identities as based in roles. Scholarship in this tradition tends to move forward from this conceptualization to better understand identity salience, behavioral choice, self-verification, and other aspects of identity processes, with little attention to other bases of identity. Our findings affirm the importance of roles, but also suggest the value of continued consideration of the bases of identities. Adult social roles had some of the largest effects on feeling older and self-perceived adulthood. Yet non-role factors also shape subjective age identities. These factors include age-graded responsibilities, which we tapped into through the frequency of performing housework and intensity of paid employment, as well as lack of safety and exposure to violence, which constituted an experience of hardship significantly related to feeling older even with our identified mediators controlled. With respect to self-perceived adulthood, race/ethnicity and parental education levels also shaped age identity in ways not fully accounted for by differential acquisition of adult social roles, nor by exposure to hardship or our theorized mediators. These findings suggest that the social context of growing up also directs one’s understanding of whether one has reached adult status. Further attention to these sources of age identities will likely prove useful in building a broader theoretical understanding of how identities develop.

Our findings also speak to several ongoing discussions in the life-course tradition. First, findings from this study support a key distinction from this tradition: statistical age normativity and social age norms are not one and the same ( Settersten 2003 ). The distribution of responses to our measure of relative age indicates this most clearly: 59 percent of respondents feel older than others their age most or all of the time. It is thus statistically normative to feel non-normative. Our findings suggest that comparisons are made to cultural understandings of the behaviors one engages in at different ages, rather than to the actual behaviors of others one’s age. Like the children of Lake Wobegon who are all above average, young people in the United States disproportionately feel older than others their age. Previous studies indicate this changes as people get older. Adults in their thirties and beyond tend to report younger subjective ages compared to their chronological age ( Montepare and Lachman 1989 ; Galambos et al. 2005 ). Our findings on the predictors of subjective age also support that it is not what adolescents’ age peers are doing (i.e., what is statistically normative), but ideas about what one should be doing at a given age (social norms) that shapes subjective age.

Second, rapid change in the demography of the transition to adulthood has led to an important debate on the relevance of adult social roles in understanding the contemporary nature of adulthood in Western societies (e.g., Arnett 2000 ; Furstenberg et al. 2003 ; Shanahan et al. 2005 ). We find in a nationally representative sample that entry into adult roles is associated with age identity in a way that affirms their importance in defining and signifying adulthood for today’s young people. These role transitions also partially mediate the effect of chronological age on feeling adult, showing that social processes, more than just advancing years, influence young adults’ subjective sense of their own age.

Finally, the effect of early hardship on the self-concept has long been of interest to life-course social psychologists and the findings of this study contribute to this line of inquiry as well. The primary foci in this area have been the implications of hardship for self-efficacy and self-esteem (e.g., Whitbeck et al. 1991 , 1997 ). We join another recent study in expanding the scope of consideration, showing that hardship is associated with another aspect of the self-concept: age identity. Foster et al. (2008) also recently found that childhood neglect and adolescent intimate-partner violence accelerate “subjective weathering,” a concept overlapping with relative age. The ways that young people interpret their place in the life course and temporal dimensions of their lives, including the pace of aging, are linked to early hardship.

Much work is still needed on the implications of older subjective ages during adolescence and young adulthood. Our contributions in the current study do not hinge on whether older age identities in this stage of the life course are detrimental or beneficial, but that question deserves additional attention. Growing up too fast can mean “pseudomaturity” ( Galambos et al. 1999 ; Greenberger and Steinberg 1986 ), in which feeling older and mimicking adult behaviors is not matched by genuine psychosocial maturity. Having an older subjective age is associated with adolescent substance use, problem behavior, and more involvement with opposite-sex peers (Arbeau, Galambos, and Jansson 2007; Galambos et al. 1999 ), some of which can be thought of as adult behaviors assumed too early. Subjective age could be a mechanism reproducing or maintaining disadvantages from childhood or adolescence into adulthood.

And yet, feeling older may also facilitate taking more mature approaches to solving problems and accepting responsibility for oneself and others. Moreover, having an older subjective age may be an adaptive response that enables adolescents to make the best of difficult situations. For example, a teenage parent who comes to see him/herself as older, more mature, adult even, may be more likely to behave in adult ways. Shanahan (2000 :677) noted, “The manner in which people respond to challenges and stressors may account for differences in the transition to adulthood.” To the extent that feeling adult is linked to more mature reactions to stress, feeling adult sooner could be beneficial. Initial positive benefits could, alternatively, be combined with later difficulties, however, and vice versa.

Perhaps the larger question might be posed in terms of when having an older subjective age is detrimental and when it is beneficial. We see several potentially important distinctions to consider. First, the implications of developing older subjective ages in adolescence may depend on the level of agency afforded the adolescent. Some young people may choose to take on greater responsibilities and make earlier transitions. Young people who do not anticipate attending college in the future and who invest heavily in paid work during adolescence ( Mortimer 2003 ) may fall into this group. In contrast, hardship by its very definition is something that is thrust upon children and adolescents, and thus we might expect more negative consequences. A second distinction is likely important, though, and that is whether in developing an older subjective age, young people also develop genuine maturity. Even those thrust into demanding situations may rise to the challenge, developing successful coping skills and becoming more autonomous and socially responsible. The extant literature suggests it is pseudomaturity—having an older subjective age without genuine maturity—that is linked to problematic outcomes during adolescence. Such behaviors could not be viewed as beneficial outcomes even if agentically selected. Whether genuine or pseudomaturity develops may rest on family and community contexts, a third distinction in need of scrutiny. One can imagine the adolescent who takes on extra responsibilities in the face of hardship but who works alongside parents or other individuals who model maturity and provide support. One can also imagine an adolescent burdened with responsibilities without such support (e.g., assuming a parental role for siblings and managing the household for an overworked or otherwise unavailable parent). As this brief discussion indicates, we must examine the context of “growing up faster” during the early years if we are to understand its implications for the life course.

Acknowledgments

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524; ude.cnu@htlaehdda . No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. The authors thank Robert Crosnoe, Julie Kmec, and the members of the faculty research group at Washington State University for their comments on earlier drafts.

Biographies

Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson is an associate professor in the department of sociology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on education and work-related processes during adolescence and the transition to adulthood, and particularly the social psychological experience of this life-course transition. Her current work examines processes of subjective age identity and formation and change in ambitions during this period of the life course.

Stefanie Mollborn is an assistant professor of sociology and faculty in the Health and Society Program of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on social psychological approaches to understanding health behaviors and outcomes over the life course. Current projects include an analysis of the importance of resources for the early development of teenage parents’ children and an examination of the antecedents and consequences of social norms about adolescent pregnancy.

1 Processes of commitment, identity salience, and behavior in one strand, and that of identity standards, behavior, and self-verification in another strand, are the primary foci of identity theory scholars, of course, and our study is not intended to examine these processes.

2 We believe respondents will base this comparison in cultural images tied to their age as well as in what they directly observe about others their age. On the latter, note that the requested comparison to “others your age” is likely to elicit different reference groups across individuals, affecting respondents’ answers to the question.

3 These adult role transitions tend to covary, of course. For respondents who had experienced each of these role transitions, mean levels of every other transition were higher than among those who had not (at least p < .05; not shown) with one exception. Full-time work was not more common among those who had become parents and vice versa.

4 There was some overlap between these measures (F(1,128)=1509.62***). As we dichotomized the responses, of those expecting to be killed by age 21, slightly over half expected to be alive at 35. Of those expecting to be alive at 35, 10 percent expected by be killed by age 21.

5 Significant gender interactions were evident in some of these effects. With respect to feeling older, the coefficients for 200–300 percent of the poverty line and for feeling unsafe were more positive for males than for females; the coefficient for experiencing or witnessing violence was more positive for females than for males. With respect to feeling adult, the coefficients for “other” family structures, experiencing or witnessing violence, and being a parent were more positive for females than for males.

6 We assess mediation using the three-pronged approach outlined by Barron and Kenny (1986) . In each case for which we claim mediation, all three criteria were met. That the mediators have a significant association with the dependent variables is shown in Table 2 . That the hardships show a reduction in their associations with the dependent variable across a model excluding the potential mediator and another including the potential mediator is shown in Table 2 (supplemental models confirmed that these reductions were due to the role transitions specifically and are provided at www.asanet.org/spq ). That the hardships predict the mediators is provided at www.asanet.org/spq .

7 We conducted Sobel-Goodman significance tests ( p < .05) of mediation for all these relationships. These tests, which could only be performed on the unweighted data, demonstrated that having a child, not being a student, and marriage/cohabitation each significantly mediated the effects of each of the hardships described in the text. In addition, living on one’s own significantly mediated the effects of other two-parent families and other family structures on feeling older, and full-time work significantly mediated the effects of other two-parent families and household incomes 100–200 percent of the poverty line on feeling adult.

8 Sobel-Goodman significance tests of mediation on unweighted data confirmed that having a child, not being a student, and marriage/cohabitation partially mediated the relationship between exposure to violence and feeling older ( p < .05). These role transitions plus living on one’s own partially mediated the relationship between having a single mother and feeling older.

Contributor Information

MONICA KIRKPATRICK JOHNSON, Washington State University.

STEFANIE MOLLBORN, University of Colorado–Boulder.

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The Real Reason Young Adults Seem Slow to ‘Grow Up’

It’s not a new developmental stage; it’s the economy.

Every generation, it seems, bemoans the irresponsibility and self-indulgence of the one that follows. Even Socrates described the folly of youth in ancient Greece, lamenting: “Youth now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority.” However, in recent years, commentators have argued that something is distinctly stunted about the development of today’s young adults. Many have pointed to Millennials and Gen Zers as being uniquely resistant to “growing up.” Some theorists have even suggested that a new developmental stage is needed to account for the fact that youth today are taking longer to reach adulthood and are more reliant on their parents than generations past.

Yet nothing about delaying adulthood and extending adolescence is uniquely modern. Taking more time to come of age is not due to lack of stamina or motivation on the part of today’s youth, as the common narrative proclaims. Delayed adulthood is an expected response to the economic conditions shaping the period when young adults enter the workforce.

Read: When are you really an adult?

Five indicators are commonly understood as the markers of adulthood : finishing one’s education, leaving home, finding work, finding a life partner, and having children. Although many young adults reach the legal age of adulthood before they achieve these five markers, and others do not choose to reach them all, many still consider some combination of these benchmarks to define what it means to be an adult. Compared with the mid-20th century, young adults in the United States appear to be taking longer to reach these markers today. Fewer young-adult men ages 16 to 24 are settled into permanent jobs , and fewer men and women are married with children today than in the 1950s. Further, the median age at first marriage for men rose from 23 in 1950 to 30 by 2018 . For women, the median age at first marriage rose from 20 to 28 over the same period . These mid-20th-century patterns are often used as the measuring stick against which young adults today are judged. Based on these data, young people today do seem unique in delaying adulthood. But this is only part of the picture.

Looking at a broader arc of history, across more than a century, a different pattern emerges. In the late 19th century, youth achieved the markers of adulthood at ages similar to youth today. Despite the fact that life expectancy was less than 50 years, in 1890 the median age at first marriage was 26 for men , though women still married relatively young, at a median age of 22. The number of young adults living with their parents over the years forms a U-shaped curve: In 1900, 41 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 lived with their parents , rising to 48 percent in the aftermath of the Great Depression. That number dipped to 29 percent in 1960 and then rose steadily again, reaching 47 percent in early 2020, just prior to the pandemic shutdowns. The evolution of the average age of childbearing shows similar parallels, taking a dip in the mid-20th century. Considering this longer time frame, it becomes clear that young adults in the 1950s were the outliers. Today’s youth reach the markers of adulthood on remarkably similar timelines to the youth of a century ago.

The sense of pressure and angst that many young adults feel about the future is also not unique to our time. In 2016, we discovered a forgotten archive of research, conducted from the 1950s to the 1970s, in the attic of an old building at Harvard University. This discovery included reel-to-reel tape recordings of college students who, at the end of each school year, had been asked just one open-ended question: “What stood out to you from the past year?” In hour-long reflections, they shared their struggles and triumphs, their worries and hopes. These recordings offered us an opportunity to listen to the voices of young adults describing the process of growing up while they were in the midst of the experience. We heard these students describe what it meant to become an adult in their contemporary context. The students’ concerns, anxieties, and goals seemed to transcend time and echo the voices of the students we study today.

The researchers who recorded these interviews made an assumption similar to what many people think today. Having previously conducted research with students in the ’50s, they sensed that something was different about coming of age in the 1960s, amid a cultural shift that marked a transformative moment in history. Yet what they found was that despite different historical contexts and increased demographic diversity in their later samples, students from the 1960s and ’70s reported having a very similar experience in transitioning to adulthood as those from the ’50s. Finding little value in the “null” research results, the researchers abandoned the study and packed it up into the attic, where it stayed for 50 years.

After we discovered this trove of data, we spent five years reanalyzing it, looking for differences and similarities in the coming-of-age experience across generations. The differences came only from anachronistic cultural or historical references, such as referring to President Richard Nixon or the Vietnam War when discussing politics. But these students shared core developmental experiences with young people today. On the old recordings, students described feeling overwhelmed because they did not know the best path forward or how to figure it out. They worried about getting meaningful jobs and about how to make high-stakes decisions when faced with numerous opportunities and trade-offs. They felt pressure from their parents to succeed academically and professionally. They felt pressure to not squander their opportunities. But they had a hard time finding support from others to help them navigate the new terrain of life after school. Consequently, many felt lost, paralyzed, and uncertain about the future.

In these recordings, we heard students describe wanting time: time to connect their purpose to a fulfilling career, and to catch their breath before plowing forward into the unrelenting responsibility of adulthood. In short, these young adults were seeking to delay reaching adulthood much like many Millennials and Gen Zers do today. The parallels we discovered helped us understand why and when youth need more time to transition to adulthood.

Given that so-called delayed adulthood is not unique to modern life, to make sense of it, we must look at the circumstances young adults find themselves in. Finishing school and finding a job can be seen as prerequisites for the main factors—becoming financially stable and independent—that impact someone's ability to reach the other milestones of adulthood. Young adults’ ability to find a job that enables them to be financially independent affects their ability to leave home, and feel comfortable marrying and raising children. A Pew Research Center study found that lack of financial readiness is a key reason for delaying marriage among young adults today.

Read: How capitalism broke young adulthood

The time it takes to transition to adulthood has more to do with being able to transition to the workforce than the perceived apathy of youth. Young people reach adult milestones later when jobs that lead to financial independence are scarce or require additional training. The well-paying manufacturing jobs that were abundant in the 1950s did not exist in the 1890s. In the early 1900s, the U.S. transitioned from a largely agrarian economy to an industrialized one, and many young adults moved from rural to urban areas in search of modern industrial jobs.

In the context of this economic transition, the “high school movement” emerged. From about 1910 to 1940, there was a significant investment in high-school education, and enrollment rates increased from roughly 18 percent to 73 percent in that time. High-school curricula were designed to prepare students with the skills and knowledge they needed to succeed in the “new economy” of the 1940s, thereby aligning education with needed job skills. Better education meant that youth were better prepared for the jobs that flourished in the postwar economic boom, which meant that young people could transition to adulthood at earlier ages in the ’50s than they had been able to before. Stable jobs that required only a high-school education became scarcer in the subsequent decades, and achieving these milestones began to take longer.

Today, the economy is in transition again, which is affecting young adults’ ability to achieve the markers of adulthood. The rise of a knowledge-based economy means that this generation needs more education and training to gain the skills they need to succeed financially. Many entry-level jobs now require a college degree, which takes time to obtain. Achieving financial stability with only a high-school education is harder today than it was in the 1950s.

Trends in delaying adulthood play out across the decades and lead people to stereotype entire generations. However, within generations, there is also variation in who has the privilege to delay adulthood and who does not. All young adults are affected to some degree by the state of the economy they inherit. However, those who attend college get the luxury of more time to “figure things out” and to gain the knowledge and social capital that help them invent themselves in ways that align with the economy. Many of those who do not attend college take on the responsibilities of adulthood at an earlier age, regardless of their generation. Data show that they have a median age of first marriage that is two to three years younger than their peers who earn a college degree . Even those who graduated from college in the 1950s , the heyday of “early adulthood,” delayed marriage until a median age of 24 for women and 26 for men.

Young adults are not less mature today than in the past. Neither are they necessarily more self-centered. A new developmental stage is not necessary to account for the extended time that many youth need to make the transition to adulthood. We are not the first researchers to challenge the idea of “emerging adulthood” as a distinct life stage , but we have new historical data that help us understand when and why youth feel they need more time to become adults. Our findings tell us something important: When young adults take longer to achieve the markers of adulthood, it is not that something has changed about them ; it is that the world has changed.

Social Influences on Children’ Growing Up Essay

Introduction, the role of social class, and family life, education and schooling, access to resources and the role of governmental policy, reference list.

Human growth and development is a complicated process which is inevitably impacted upon by socioeconomic circumstances within which an individual is growing up Damon and Lerner (2006). In the end these circumstances determine the personality and behavior of an individual as well as their health and socioeconomic status. An individual’s attitude and perceptions are largely shaped by the socioeconomic surroundings within which they grow up and live as children and to a considerable extent as adults. The purpose of this task is to discuss how social influences affect outcomes for children growing up in two different socio-economic circumstances in Sydney, that is, in Double Bay and Redfern.

Double Bay and Redfern are suburbs of Sidney with different socioeconomic conditions. Double Bay is found in new South Wales state four kilometers south of Sydney Rawlings-Way (2010). It is the administrative centre of the local government of Woollahra Municipality Rawlings-Way (2010). Comparatively, Double Pay is a wealthy residential suburb thus its nickname “Double Pay”. On the other hand Redfern is an inner-city suburb of Sidney located three kilometers south of Sydney central business district and is part of the local government of Sydney city Rawlings-Way (2010). There is a high level of concentration of poverty in Redfern and its neighboring Waterloo Rawlings-Way (2010).

Virtually all societies are stratified in to social classes or groupings mainly on the basis of individual and family incomes and general material wealth. Children growing up in diverse social classes experience life differently. Lareau (2003) argues that social class diversity influence the very pace and rhythm of daily life. In a capitalist economy like Australia a person’s social class generally determines the kind of socioeconomic conditions he or she lives and grows in even though there is upward movement of people in between the classes.

Malina,Bouchard and Bar-Or (2004) point out that living conditions related to socioeconomic status include difference in education background of parents, acquisition power for food and in turn nutritional status, access to and use of health care amenities and programs and by and large regularity of lifestyle. These scholars further observe that the socioeconomic status of a child’s family is an important factor that influences growth and maturation. A child from well off socioeconomic circumstances like Double Bay tend to be on average taller and heavier than those from socioeconomic conditions like Redfern Malina,Bouchard and Bar-Or (2004).

Damon and Lerner (2006) argues that family composition and social class put forth significant influences on the way parents bring up their children and their expectations of children as they grow. It is noteworthy Parenting is important in an individual child’s life particularly during the formative years as well as during young adulthood. Parents of children from the rich classes and small family sizes like Double bay are able to monitor each child closely thereby identify their strengths, talents weaknesses and help them accordingly. Parents from the upper and middle classes are normally more educated than their counterparts in the lower strata of the society thus they tend to be more realistic and liberal in terms of allowing their children to pursue what they are talented and interested in.

They do so by providing the required moral and material support for success in whatever their child chooses to pursue in their lives. Generally, educated parents unlike uneducated ones help in identification and nurturing of their children talents and abilities thereby raising their possibility of success later in life. On the other hand, parents from lower social classes like in Redfern may block a child from pursuing what they are interested in out of ignorance as a result of lack of education and exposure. In most cases they may lack moral and material ability needed to support their children in pursuing their life interests.

In a nut shell, parents have significant functions to play in children’s physical continued existence, social growth, emotional maturation and cognitive development Damon and Lerner (2006). In the end as children attain independence parenthood is understood as having enhanced a child’s self-assurance, capacity for intimate relationship, achievement enthusiasm, enjoyment in play and work, closeness and friendships with peers, and lifelong academic success and fulfillment Damon and Lerner (2006).

However, it is noteworthy that human development is too delicate, dynamic and complicated to hold that parenting alone determines the track and outcome of a child’s development from childhood to maturity Damon and Lerner (2006). More often than not stature in maturity is formed by the actions, changes and unexpected difficulties of an individual child across the life span Damon and Lerner (2006).In other words parenthood alone cannot fix the course and boundary of a child’s development.

This is so because according to (Damon and Lerner 2006; Singleman and Rider 2008) parent and child actively build one another through time. Therefore in as much as parenthood plays a critical role in the physical, social, emotional, spiritual and intellectual growth and development of a child there are other significant socioeconomic factors which determine the outcome of a children growing in differing circumstances as we are going to see in the next sections.

The family is the first societal unit in which a child’s socialization process begins and even continues throughout their lives. As a social basic unit family life is inevitably impacted up on by community circumstances and in turn impacts up on the growth and development of a child. Therefore, communal factors in Double Bay and Redfern suburbs to some degree determine the manner and organization of customs within the family units found there Mawle,Cowley and Adams (2007).

According to Mawle, Cowley and Adams (2007) these factors include educational and employment opportunities that will shape the economic condition of the family and in turn impacting on the availability of material resources significant for sustain a happy and comfortable life in terms of for example maintaining good health. At the family level a child embraces beliefs and values espoused by the elder family members beginning with his or her parents. These beliefs and values shape a child’s perceptions and attitudes as he or she develops from childhood to maturity.

And even though family beliefs and values that a child adopts from his or her family they are subject to change renouncement along an individual child’s life they inevitably affect social stature and personality later in life. For instance, those that grow up in rich families are likely to embrace an attitude of success and greatness as a result of the motivating surroundings they grow up in while their age mates growing up in poor families may lack a positive outlook towards life because of the discouragement and dehumanization that accompanies poverty.

Education and schooling are certainly important determining factor of the kind of a person an individual grow up to be. It is largely at school where the important intellectual, social, spiritual as well as emotional growth of a child is taken care of by presumably combined efforts of the parents, teachers, government and the wider society. The school that child attend determines the kind of friendships and networks and the accompanying social influences that a child forms. In a great way it also determines who they marry later in life and thus the kind families they raise. A Child’s educational background also determines the kind of jobs he or she will get in adulthood which in turn determines their purchasing power in the market.

Children from rich families like majority of those in Double Bay attend schools with adequate learning facilities and enough teachers Youdell (2010). Therefore, they stand a chance of getting quality education unlike their counterparts from poor families in Redfern where levels of poverty are high. Within the schools of the rich teachers to students ratio is low compared to the overcrowded schools of children from poor families. Teachers are therefore able to pay more attention to a child’s educational, social and emotional needs than in congested schools where teachers are weighed down by the high number of students and pupils.

Apart from the high quality education that a child growing up in Double Bay is likely to get their artistic and sporting talents and abilities are easily identified and closely nurtured by professional teachers unlike in schools of the poor where teachers for unexaminable studies are few or nonexistent at all. Such students also get adequate exposure to real life activities through educational and picnic trips. By and large the kind of education and schooling that a child undergoes is directly linked to the well being of their self-confidence as they grow and to some extent in adulthood.

As mentioned earlier the educational backgrounds of parents for children in Double Bay are different from that of parents in Redfern and in turn their socioeconomic status is different and thus their purchasing power which determines the quality of life that their children lead. By inheritance their children may inherit their either good or bad socioeconomic status and carry it over to their grandchildren. Ricci and Kyle () argues that children are brought up differently by parents of different educational levels, occupations and incomes.

Certainly, there is no one particular social institution that can be said to be the sole determinant of how a child grows up in different socioeconomic circumstances. However, the media as a social institution is increasingly playing a critical role in the formation process of a child’s personality and behavior particularly in the liberal Western societies.Charlesworth point out that the media influence children’s social behavior. Here it is important to note that the influence can either be positive or negative.

Parents have the responsibility of censoring and regulating what their children watch on TV as well as closely monitoring what they can access on the internet especially in the societies where freedom of expression is excessive such that the content disseminated by the media may be unfit for children. However, this is not all always possible because parents are not always with their children round the clock. Under such circumstances responsible parents delegate power and responsibility of regulating what their children consume from the media to those taking care of them.

Social influences of the media on children growing in different socioeconomic circumstances like Double Bay and Redfern differ mainly because of differences in terms of what they can access through the media. Whereas those growing up in affluent families like in Double Bay where TVs, computers and other electronic and print media is available, accessible and affordable may benefit from programs designed purposely for intellectual and social growth and development of the children those growing up in poor families in Redfern lack such an opportunity.

Also Double Bay children get a wider exposure through electronic and print media to other cultures within their countries and outside their countries thus making them more informed and intelligent than their counterparts growing up in poor families in Redfern where electronic as well as print media is a luxury that is unaffordable and unnecessary compared to other competing needs for survival. Besides the wide exposure through electronic and print media that children growing up in rich suburbs like Double Bay benefit from they also stand a chance of acquiring necessary computer skills and access to beneficial information for their school projects through the internet and other modern technologies which are largely alien to those growing up in Redfern poor families Evra (2004).Evra argues that limited access to technology for children growing up in poor families lessen their apparent computer know-how. However, limited technological inaccessibility does not be a sign of a lack of interest or ability to learn the necessary skills Evra (2004).

According to Evra (2004) even though children and adolescents with less access are exposed to fewer harmful messages and information they miss more positive and all of the advantages that computer use can bestow for either information, academic or for entertainment. Weaker computer capability may also endanger future employment opportunities Evra (2004).

According to Anderson and Looney (2002) access to resources or policy interventions may support young children, either by directly improving their outcomes by improving their physical and social environments in a way that leads to better outcomes. Anderson and Looney (2002) point out that access to resources or policy interventions directed to children and their environments can reduce environmental risks and promote positive outcomes. For instance, children growing up in Double Bay where access to financial resources and government sponsored amenities is easy stand a chance of better conditions in terms of their health, educational performance and economic security.

On the other hand those growing up in poor suburbs like Redfern may lack access necessary resources like social amenities as a result of a discriminative governmental policy. Lack of access to health care services for instance impacts on the health of the children as they grow up. Whereas growing up in Double bay may have access to better government and other well maintained resources their counterparts growing up in Redfern where concentration of poverty is high may lack such privileges especially if policy makers are not fair.

To sum up, human growth and development is a complicated process whose outcomes are determined by various social factors. These factors are related to but not limited to social class, family life of a child, education and schooling of both the child and the parents or guardians themselves, the influence of the media and now new technology like the internet and access to resources and role off the government policy. The task has explored the role of parenthood in the formation of a child growing in different socioeconomic circumstances.

Anderson, C. L., & Looney, Janet, W. (2002). Making progress: essays in progress and public policy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Damon, W., & Lerner, Richard M. (2006). Handbook of Child Psychology: Child psychology in practice. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Evra, J. (2004). Television and child development . New York: Routledge.

Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Malina, R. M., Bouchard, C. & Bar-Or, O. (2004). Growth, maturation, and physical activity. Windsor, Ontario: Human Kinetics.

Mawle, A., Cowley’s., & Adams, C. (2007). Community public health in policy and practice: a sourcebook. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier Health Sciences.

Rawlings-Way, C. (2010). Sydney . New York: Lonely Planet.

Ricci, S., & Kyle, T. (2008). Maternity and pediatric nursing . Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Singleman, C. K. , & Rider, E. A. (2008). Life-Span Human Development . New York: Cengage Learning.

Youdell, D. (2010). Identity, Power and Politics in Education . New York: Taylor & Francis.

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To Kill a Mockingbird

Everything you need for every book you read..

Over the course of the novel’s three years, Scout , Dill , and Jem grow up both physically and mentally. They begin the novel with a firm and uncomplicated idea of what’s good and what’s bad, but by the end of the novel, they’ve all lost their innocence and have come to a more complex understanding of how people and the world work. In particular, having Scout, whom the reader meets at age six, narrate the story allows the novel to show clearly how children lose their innocence as they grow—while also using Scout’s innocence to look freshly at Maycomb and her world to criticize its flaws.

Though Scout is a precocious child in a variety of ways, the novel also goes to great lengths to comically demonstrate how innocent and unaware Scout is of the world around her. For example, she believes Jem’s unfounded claim that the teaching method Miss Caroline promotes is called the Dewey Decimal System—in reality, a system of organizing a library—and referring to her and Jem’s snowman as an “Absolute Morphodite” in such a way that betrays that she has no idea what “morphodite” actually means (a hermaphrodite, a plant or animal with both male and female sex organs). The children also firmly believe, for the first year of the novel, that Boo Radley is a zombie-like figure who eats small mammals or, possibly, is dead and stuffed up the chimney of the Radley house. While undeniably humorous to the reader, who’s likely aware that these notions are ridiculous and incorrect, the beliefs themselves function as a window into just how youthful and innocent Scout, Jem, and Dill truly are.

The children’s innocence, as represented by these instances of misunderstandings or far-fetched superstitions, isn’t always entirely humorous, however. Particularly once Scout begins attending school, the novel suggests that even though children may be prone to this kind of nonsense and far-fetched storytelling, they’re still innately able to recognize the ridiculousness of the adult world around them, and in particular, the ineffectiveness of the school system. Scout’s precocity and intelligence means that when she enters the first grade, she already knows how to read and write, both printing and cursive—something that her teacher, Miss Caroline, finds threatening and offensive for seemingly no real reason, and even punishes Scout for. In this sense, Scout begins to see that the adult world is just as nonsensical as the reader can see that Scout’s childhood world is—though the adult world is one that forces growing children to conform and fall into line, rather than one that relies on imagination and individuality. With this, Scout is encouraged by Atticus to understand that while she may one day have to enter the world of adults and grow up, the path to get there is one on which she’ll have to fight constantly for her individuality. As the novel wears on and Scout witnesses terrible cruelty and injustice, it also suggests that she’ll also have to fight hard to maintain her sense of compassion, right, and wrong.

Mr. Gilmer ’s interrogation of Tom Robinson is a wakeup call for the children, and their reaction to Robinson’s the trial suggests that although children can be naïve, they are often more perceptive and compassionate than the supposedly mature adults around them. Dill, in particular, is angered and overcome by the rude and racist way that Mr. Gilmer speaks to Robinson. Outside the courthouse, Mr. Raymond , a man whom Scout previously thought was an evil drunk, suggests that Dill only has the reaction he does because he’s a child—as children grow, he suggests, they lose their capacity to cry over injustices like Robinson experiences, as they learn to conform to adult rules of polite society that forbid reactions like that (and for white people like Scout and Dill, also discourages that kind of compassion directed toward black people in the first place). Mr. Raymond is, notably, an outsider in Maycomb, as he’s white and yet lives with his black girlfriend because he wants to, a choice that’s unthinkable to even someone like Scout. It’s because of his outsider status that he’s able to make these observations and confirm for Dill that what’s happening to Robinson is awful—though it’s still possible, he suggests, that Dill will one day “fall into line” and conform to the hatred around him. Later, Atticus echoes Mr. Raymond when he tells an angry and tearful Jem that juries have been wrongfully convicting black men for years, will continue to do so, and that only children cry when it happens—another indicator that children, who are more unencumbered by social codes and pressure to fit in, are innately able to pick up on injustices like this. The hope, the novel suggests, is that they’ll be able to maintain this ability to look at the world in this way once they enter the adult world and face pressures to conform and bury their sense of right and wrong.

Tom Robinson’s trial represents the end of an era of blissful innocence for both Scout and Jem. Jem in particular struggles to understand how such a thing could’ve happened, a thought process that Atticus suggests simply reflects where Jem is in his development—at 13, Jem understands better than Scout how the case unfolded, which makes it more difficult in many ways for him to deal with. While the novel doesn’t resolve Jem’s angst and inability to wrap his head around what happened, it does offer hope that both he and Scout will be able to maintain their moral compasses, as well as their compassion, into adulthood. Scout’s major coming-of-age moment happens as she stands on the Radley porch and, as Atticus has instructed her to do at several points, "climb[s] into [Boo Radley's] skin.” She’s able to understand, through this, that Boo may be very different from her in a variety of ways, but he’s still a compassionate, self-sacrificial neighbor who’s worthy of respect and kindness. This leap in understanding suggests that as Scout continues to grow and develop past the novel’s close, she will be able to maintain her belief in what’s morally right, even as she loses her innocence and moves toward adulthood.

Growing Up ThemeTracker

Growing Up Quotes in To Kill a Mockingbird

After my bout with Cecil Jacobs when I committed myself to a policy of cowardice, word got around that Scout Finch wouldn't fight any more, her daddy wouldn't let her.

“Atticus, you must be wrong…”

“How's that?”

“Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong…”

Dill's eyes flickered at Jem, and Jem looked at the floor. Then he rose and broke the remaining code of our childhood. He went out of the room and down the hall. “Atticus,” his voice was distant, “can you come here a minute, sir?”

Beneath its sweat-streaked dirt Dill's face went white. I felt sick.

Jem was standing in a corner of the room, looking like the traitor he was. “Dill, I had to tell him,” he said. “You can't run three hundred miles off without your mother knowin'.” We left him without a word.

“Well how do you know we ain't Negroes?”

“Uncle Jack Finch says we really don't know. He says as far as he can trace back the Finches we ain't, but for all he knows we mighta come straight out of Ethiopia durin' the Old Testament.”

“Well if we came out durin' the Old Testament it's too long ago to matter.”

“That's what I thought," said Jem, “but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black.”

“The way that man called him 'boy' all the time an' sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered— … It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that—it just makes me sick.”

“They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”

[Jem] was certainly never cruel to animals, but I had never known his charity to embrace the insect world.

“Why couldn't I mash him?” I asked.

“Because they don't bother you,” Jem answered in the darkness. He had turned out his reading light.

A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing-pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.

It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's [...] Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.

Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.

Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

“When they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice…” His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.” He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

EnglishGrammarSoft

Essay about Growing Up

I remember, as a child opening my eyes to this great big world. As a hopeful child, I was very eager to please my parents and teachers. However, as I grew into adulthood and was thrust into the outside world without any knowledge, I became disillusioned about the world around me. I realized as an adult that you have to come to terms with what life is really like. The real world is full of strife and hardship, but also contains many beautiful things. It’s a series of ups and downs, and you have to take it all in stride.

I remember, as a child opening my eyes to this great big world.

I remember, as a child opening my eyes to this great big world. I was so young and so curious about everything around me. I wanted to know what made things the way they were. I wanted to know why there was good in this world and bad in that one. I asked questions about everything and anything that came into my mind: Why does the sun rise? Why does it set? What are stars made of? Where do rainbows come from? Why can’t we fly like birds or swim like fish?

As a hopeful child, I was very eager to please my parents and teachers.

I did whatever they asked me to do. I studied hard at school and got good grades. Every night before going to sleep, I would pray earnestly for them (my parents) and for our family as well as for all the people around us.

Growing up is also a time when we learn how to make decisions on our own without relying on others’ opinions or advice because we want to be independent individuals who can take care of ourselves in any situation that may arise in our lives.

We learn all these lessons by observing what happens around us: what works out well or not so well; whether or not someone gets hurt because of their decision; whether one should listen more carefully next time before deciding which option will work best in order not have any regrets later on down the road!

As I grew into adulthood, was thrust into the outside world , I became disillusioned

The world can be a harsh place for a child, but it will teach them what they need to know so that when they grow up, they can face reality with confidence. As a child, I was taught how to look at the world in a positive light and allow myself opportunities to explore my surroundings. This led me to have an optimistic view of life as an adult. My parents exposed me to many different cultures and areas of study so that I could understand more about humanity and its struggles throughout history.

I realized as an adult that you have to come to terms with what life is really like

As you grow up, you have to come to terms with what life is really like. As an adult, you must make decisions, take responsibility for your actions, make sacrifices and learn from your mistakes. Those are all things that we take for granted as children but they become much more important as adults. When I was a kid, I would jump from one thing to another without any regard for how it might affect my future or the people around me. Now that I am older and wiser I know better than to act rashly or impulsively because life isn’t always perfect and sometimes we don’t get what we want right away so we have to learn how to wait things out until they work out in our favor instead of forcing our way into situations just because we want them now!

The real world is full of strife and hardship, but also contains many beautiful things

The real world is full of strife and hardship, but also contains many beautiful things. It’s difficult to find beauty in the world, but it is possible if you look hard enough. There are many wonderful places in the world that we should all appreciate because they can make us happy.

It’s a series of ups and downs, and you have to take it all in stride.

You have to remember that life is a series of ups and downs, good times and bad. You can’t let the good times blind you to the fact that there will be hard times too—and sometimes they’ll come one after another. Life has a way of putting you through the ringer, but if you’re prepared and ready for whatever comes your way, it won’t knock you down as much as it would someone who wasn’t expecting it at all.

I know it can be hard to grow up, but I’m glad that I did. The world is full of wonderful things and there’s no better time than now to experience them!

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Trump’s lawyers say it is impossible for him to post bond covering $454 million civil fraud judgment

A New York judge ordered Donald Trump and his companies to pay $355 million. The judge found they engaged in a years-long scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures towards the crowd at a campaign rally Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

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Donald Trump is facing four criminal indictments, and a civil lawsuit. You can track all of the cases here .

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s lawyers told a New York appellate court Monday that it’s impossible for him to post a bond covering the full amount of a $454 million civil fraud judgment while he appeals, suggesting the former president’s legal losses have put him in a serious cash crunch.

Trump’s lawyers wrote in a court filing that “obtaining an appeal bond in the full amount” of the judgment “is not possible under the circumstances presented.” Trump claimed last year that he has “fairly substantially over $400 million in cash,” but back-to-back courtroom defeats have pushed his legal debt north of a half-billion dollars.

Citing rejections from more than 30 bond underwriters, Trump’s lawyers asked the state’s intermediate appeals court to reverse a prior ruling requiring that he post a bond covering the full amount in order to halt enforcement while he appeals the judgment in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit.

Trump’s financial constraints are being laid bare as he appeals Judge Arthur Engoron’s Feb. 16 ruling that he and his co-defendants schemed for years to deceive banks and insurers by inflating his wealth on financial statements used to secure loans and make deals.

If the appeals court does not intervene, James can seek to enforce the judgment starting March 25. James, a Democrat, has said she will seek to seize some of Trump’s assets if he is unable to pay.

With interest, Trump owes the state $456.8 million. That amount is increasing nearly $112,000 each day. In all, he and co-defendants, including his company, sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. and other executives, owe $467.3 million. To obtain a bond, they would be required to post collateral covering 120% of the judgment, or about $557.5 million, Trump’s lawyers said.

Trump maintains that he is worth several billion dollars, but much of his wealth is tied up in his skyscrapers, golf courses and other properties. Few underwriters were willing to issue such a large bond and none would accept Trump’s real estate assets as collateral, instead requiring cash or cash equivalents, such as stocks or bonds, his lawyers said.

Trump’s lawyers said freeing up cash by offloading some of Trump’s properties in a “fire sale” would be impractical because such cut-rate deals would result in massive, irrecoverable losses.

Not mentioned in Trump’s court filings Monday was the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s potential financial windfall from a looming deal to put his social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, on the stock market under the ticker symbol DJT.

A shareholder meeting is scheduled for Friday. If the deal is approved, Trump would own at least 58% of shares in the company, which runs his Truth Social platform. Depending on share price, that could be worth several billion dollars.

Trump is asking a full panel of the intermediate appeals court, the Appellate Division of the state’s trial court, to stay the Engoron judgment while he appeals. His lawyers previously proposed a $100 million bond, but Appellate Division Judge Anil C. Singh rejected that after an emergency hearing on Feb. 28. A stay is a legal mechanism pausing collection of a judgment during an appeal.

In a court filing last week, Senior Assistant Solicitor General Dennis Fan urged the full appellate panel to reject what he dubbed the defense’s “trust us” argument, contending that without a bond to secure the judgment Trump may attempt to evade enforcement at a later date and force the state to “expend substantial public resources” to collect the money owed.

A full bond is necessary, Fan wrote, in part because Trump’s lawyers “have never demonstrated that Mr. Trump’s liquid assets — which may fluctuate over time — will be enough to satisfy the full amount of this judgment following appeal.”

Trump’s lawyers asked the Appellate Division panel to consider oral arguments on its request, and preemptively sought permission to appeal a losing result to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

Singh did grant some of Trump’s requests, including pausing a three-year ban on him seeking loans from New York banks. In their court filing Monday, Trump’s lawyers did not address whether they have sought a bank loan to cover the cost of the judgment or obtain cash for use as bond collateral.

Trump appealed on Feb. 26, a few days after Engoron’s judgment was made official. His lawyers have asked the Appellate Division to decide whether Engoron “committed errors of law and/or fact” and whether he abused his discretion or “acted in excess” of his jurisdiction.

Trump wasn’t required to pay his penalty or post a bond in order to appeal, and filing the appeal did not automatically halt enforcement of the judgment. Trump would receive an automatic stay if he were to put up money, assets or an appeal bond covering what he owes.

Gary Giulietti, an insurance broker friend enlisted by Trump to help obtain an appeal bond, wrote in an affidavit Monday: “A bond of this size is rarely, if ever, seen. In the unusual circumstance that a bond of this size is issued, it is provided to the largest public companies in the world, not to individuals or privately held businesses.”

Giulietti, who acts as an insurance broker for Trump’s company, testified at the civil fraud trial as an expert witness called by Trump’s lawyers. In his ruling, Engoron observed that some of Giulietti’s testimony was contradicted by other witnesses, including a different defense expert. He noted that Giulietti’s company collected $1.2 million in commissions on its Trump accounts in 2022.

In all, Trump has more than $543 million in personal legal liabilities from three civil court judgments in the past year. Bonding requirements could add at least $100 million to that total.

In January, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Earlier this month, after his lawyers made similar arguments that he be excused from posting a bond, Trump did secure a $91.6 million bond to cover 110% of the Carroll judgment while he appeals.

Last year, a jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million in a related trial. In that case, rather than post a bond, Trump put more than $5.5 million in cash in an escrow account while he appeals.

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My Tour Operator Is a B Corp. What Does That Mean? Should I Care?

A growing number of travel operators are undergoing the B Corp certification process, which can offer insight into a company’s environmental and social initiatives.

By Sophie Stuber

Tanya Dohoney has worked on sustainability initiatives for decades. A retired attorney from Texas now living in Paris, she even started the recycling program for her workplace. When it comes to travel, she also values environmentally and socially responsible companies, which led her to choose Intrepid Travel , a certified B Corp company, for a tour in Morocco in 2019.

The sheer number of sustainability certifications for the travel and tourism industry is almost overwhelming and certainly confusing. Certified B Corp enterprises must meet standards set by B Lab , a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit founded in 2006 that awards for-profit companies with certifications for social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. It can take years — and thousands of dollars — to achieve this accreditation. Globally, there are only 62 certified B Corps in the travel industry and 76 in accommodation and hospitality.

“When you see the B Corp logo, I know it’s been at least semi-vetted,” Ms. Dohoney, 64, said. “I do worry about greenwashing, but you have to start somewhere.”

Other travelers, increasingly concerned about the environmental and social impact of their planes, trains, food waste and more, feel the same way, and a growing number of travel operators are undergoing the B Corp certification process, joining multimillion dollar brands like Patagonia and Athleta, to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Aurora Expeditions , a small ship tour operator focused on polar travel, became certified in 2024, joining other travel companies like the lodging company Sawday’s , and tour companies Selective Asia and Byway . But Hayley Peacock-Gower, Aurora’s chief marketing officer, said the company has focused on sustainable travel since its inception.

“Much of this work we were already doing, but we have now committed to much more accountability and made a legal agreement to sustainability,” she said, adding that Aurora also amended the company’s constitution and formalized internal policies as part of the B Corp process.

What’s the certification process?

Companies are scored on five criteria — governance, workers’ rights, community impact, environmental impact and “stewardship of its customers” — and must achieve an assessment score of 80 or above to pass B Lab’s “Impact Assessment.” Once approved, a company must pay an annual fee based on gross annual revenue and location. For U.S.-based enterprises, this ranges from $2,000 for companies with under $500,000 in gross annual revenue to $50,000 for companies with revenue from $750,000 to $1 billion. (Some organizations, like those owned by women or veterans, can also qualify for discounted fees .)

“B Corp certification offers tourists confidence that they’re visiting and using providers that are responsible,” said Jorge Fontanez, chief executive at B Lab for the United States and Canada.

With more than 2,909 employees, Intrepid Travel is the largest B Corp in the travel industry, earning its certification in 2018.

“When there is so much green fatigue and so many certifications, it’s really hard to discern what’s best,” said Mikey Sadowski, Intrepid’s vice president of global communication. “We felt that B Corp really did have this disproportionate edge and level of trust.”

To meet B Corp standards, Intrepid, which offers trips in 120 countries on seven continents, focuses on initiatives like hiring local guides, sourcing local ingredients and materials, and reducing carbon emissions by planning train-based itineraries — instead of using air transit — when possible.

The Australia-based company recently completed its B Corp re-certification, which in 2024 includes an annual fee of 51,750 Australian dollars ($33,625) and another 900 Australian dollars ($585) for a submission fee, Mr. Sadowski said. For their original certification in 2018, the company also paid a one-time verification fee of 14,500 Australian dollars ($9,573).

Who gets left out?

While this certification can offer insights into a company’s environmental and social initiatives — and perhaps maximize profits, by winning the business of like-minded travelers — these tours and accommodations are often geared toward customers with deep pockets.

For budget travelers or those of less economic means, it can be challenging to find affordable travel companies with B Corp certifications.

“The reality is, B Corps generally skew to the luxury side of the market. And the idea of having any B Corp hostels, for example, is very rare,” said Nick Pinto, a 31-year-old Colorado-based marketing manager who spends several months a year working and traveling abroad.

Mr. Pinto calls himself a “budget conscious traveler” and has found he’s priced out of B Corp accommodations.

“It’s tricky because you want programs like B Corp to be inclusive to create a broader movement,” he said. Mr. Pinto recently spent several weeks in Mexico, but had noted that there were only two certified B Corp hotels in the country.

A third company, Hoteles BF , has since been certified.

What other certifications are out there?

Plenty, along with guidelines, verifications and “ecostars.” The last, a certification doled out by the for-profit Ecostars , evaluates hotels’ environmental impact per visitor stay. This certification, free to receive and apply for, is a fully digital process that takes two days on average to receive. Other certifications gauge sustainability efforts for short-term accommodations, tour groups and other subsectors of the travel industry.

To receive certification from the 1% for the Planet nonprofit, which was co-founded by the Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and Craig Mathews, of Blue Ribbon Flies, a fly-fishing outfitter, member companies must commit to donating 1 percent of their gross proceeds to environmental organizations. Annual dues start at $500.

The Global Sustainable Tourism Council nonprofit, which includes among its members government tourism boards, travel companies, tour operators and N.G.O.s, vets sustainability certificates.

Organizations also rely on guidelines and resolutions issued by the United Nations as part of the entity’s sustainable development agenda . The guidelines call for biodiversity and climate action initiatives, as well as energy efficiency and renewable energy usage in accommodations. Courses and webinars, which are free to enroll in and to view, charge a per-course fee of 49 euros ($53) if a user wants to complete assignments and receive a certificate of completion.

Many tour operators and travel companies have additionally announced efforts to reach net carbon neutrality, but carbon offsets have been shown to rarely capture or reduce real emissions, or reduce future emissions. The tour operator Run the Alps used to offset the flight emissions for travelers coming to its tours, but the company is re-evaluating the practice.

“Offsetting is not the panacea we hoped it was,” said Hillary Gerardi, the sustainability director at Run the Alps. “We’re trying to move from being good to doing good, which means beyond reducing our footprint, we’re trying to leave some positive impact in our community.”

The tour operator is a member of 1% for the Planet and works with the local research center and citizen-science organizer, CREA Mont Blanc .

But even when a travel company is committed to sustainability, B Corp certification can be a big ask for smaller operations.

“We’re entirely aligned with B Corp status, but up until this year, we were a really tiny company. The certification and process would have been too onerous,” said Doug Mayer, the company’s founder.

But with the company’s growth, Mayer is considering taking the step.

“I can see it coming up for us,” he said.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

Italy :  Spend 36 hours in Florence , seeking out its lesser-known pockets.

Southern California :  Skip the freeways to explore the back roads between Los Angeles and Los Olivos , a 100-mile route that meanders through mountains, canyons and star-studded enclaves.

Mongolia : Some young people, searching for less curated travel experiences, are flocking to the open spaces of this East Asian nation .

Romania :  Timisoara  may be the most noteworthy city you’ve probably never heard of , offering just enough for visitors to fill two or three days.

India: A writer fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills , taking in the tea gardens and riding a train through the hills.

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

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