I don’t have many thoughts on the “early adulthood as a new life stage” theory. As a member of the dumbest generation, I got bored partway through the NYT article and stopped reading.
Regardless, as one of the few PBC contributors who’s actually in this life stage, I’ll offer my basic take: (A) Dependency on one’s parents into adulthood, like dependency on government, is bad for the human spirit, and should be avoided whenever possible; (B) the quest to “find yourself” is pathetic and fruitless — you might as well get on with your life, do some productive work, spend your spare time and money on leisure activities you enjoy, get married, and have some kids to stave off the impending demographic catastrophe; (C) as a libertarian, I don’t think much can be done about this trend if it’s a problem.
Also, Matt Yglesias has an interesting post that asks just how widespread this phenomenon is. One of his readers writes:
My main problem with the piece was simply the fact that there wasn’t much of an attempt at making class distinctions. It delves into the “extended adolescence” of relatively sheltered graduates from major universities, but what about the mass of 20-somethings who either didn’t go to college, or pursued degrees at community colleges and local universities? I graduated from a high school of roughly 2,400 people in 2005, and judging from the Facebook profiles of those I graduated with, many of my former classmates have built fairly adult lives for themselves. Most have jobs and live independently of their parents. Some have spouses or long-term partners, a few have children. For those who do live with their parents, it has less to do with maturity, and more to do with the terrible job market. Obviously, anecdotes can’t substitute for statistical data, but I’d wager that the above is true for many 20-somethings of modest means.
This is always a problem with the Times’s coverage: The paper paints itself as the above-it-all “newspaper of record,” but in reality it caters to its readers, just like every other publication does.