London - By the time I was 25, I was a salaried employee, had bought and sold my first house, had a mortgage, insured my own car, had made some flat-pack furniture (not too successfully) and considered myself very much part of an adult world.
At a relatively early age I was shouldering a fair amount of fiscal responsibility and considered myself a person in my own right, firmly independent from my parents.
I now share an office with a number of 25-year-olds, few of whom could be regarded as fully evolved into adulthood. Nearly all live with their parents and are so hooked on their home comforts that they would like to put off their engagement with the real world until it becomes impossible to sustain.
I understand that, in London, there are often insuperable difficulties for a young person to buy a property. But I think there is more to it, and it feeds into a subject I have written about before, the creeping infantilisation of the modern world.
Now there’s hard evidence to support this.
A survey of 2 000 young people over the age of 18 revealed they only felt themselves to be truly adults at 29.
Most would spend their twenties living with their parents, getting meals cooked for them, having their washing and ironing done and, not least, paying relatively little for their accommodation.
This leaves those young people in employment with plenty of spare cash to spend on transitory stimulants (the obvious sort, but also consumer goods and foreign holidays).
More than 40 percent of young adults, according to a survey by insurance company Beagle Street, still felt like children.
They relied on their parents, and retreated to a Pixar-inspired world where the lines between childhood and adulthood are increasingly blurred.
Why go out and struggle with the complexities of life when you can retreat into a cartoon world where the jokes are known, the moral universe is one of certainties and you need not leave your comfort zone?
It’s not, say the respondents to the survey, until they have their own house, get married, pay into a pension and host dinner parties that they feel they have escaped adolescence.
Said sociologist Frank Furedi: “What people believe constitutes being an adult are significant life events that give them adult responsibilities. Until that point, regardless of their age, they are still perceived as adolescents.”
In many middle-class households, the dependency of children is a comfort for parents who, equally, are fearful of the exigencies of the outside world.
None of this is healthy. We are in danger of breeding a generation of 40-year-olds who don’t know how to use a washing machine.
The Independent