BACKGROUND

1985: CONSTANCY & CHANGE IN YOUNG ADULTHOOD

Teny Sullivan

In 1944, the forty-third yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education was entitled Adolescence. Ages ten to twenty-two were identified as adolescent on the basis of this being the period in which the growth spurt occurred. In 1975, the same yearbook’s seventy-fourth edition was entitled Youth and the period was divided into adolescence (ages ten to eighteen) and youth (ages eighteen to twenty-five). In the latter yearbook the distinction was not made on the biological base of growth, but on the types of social pressures with which young people must cope (Dacey, 1982). For commentators on adolescence, the period of striving for maturity is now seen as characterized more by social than biological factors.

The period of sixteen to twenty-four is the one used by Statistics Canada and by most provincial and federal youth programs. The period defines the youth cohort and is the age group described in astonishing detail in the federal government publication, Youth in Canada: A New Statistical Perspective (1984).

For the purposes of service providers it is the sixteen to twenty-one-year period that is of greatest interest, since it falls most often between the service world of children and the service world of adulthood. It is the period, as we will see in the papers following, when the critical developmental challenges of young adulthood are faced, and where a number of major mental disorders and familial tensions crystallize and first appear. For those of us interested in the transition from childhood to adulthood, the sixteen to twenty-one year group constitutes difficult age developmental jelly to nail to the wall. They evade child or adult categories. They need discriminate stroking and kicking. They need to be hand held, pushed, and held back. They achieve rights and assume responsibilities at different ages in different cultures and jurisdictions. Perhaps most importantly for us, the care of young adults does not easily follow from principles of care for either children or adults. Nor does the development of service. But why should these issues be of particular concern now? It was ever thus! International Youth Year (I.Y.Y.) in this country has been conceived as a way of empowering and celebrating young people. To a certain extent we have all colluded on the idea of promoting positive "hype" on youth and tried to portray exemplary young people and their exemplary social contributions. This is probably a wise approach to raising the profile of young people. It has not, however, done much to raise the profile of the young person who stumbles between sixteen and twenty-one, the person Clive Chamberlain refers to as "falling off the developmental conveyor.

I.Y.Y. is not only about happy, smart, responsible youth; I.Y.Y. gives us a reason to look at an age group whose specific developmental problems fall into the gaps between child and adult services. It also allows us the opportunity to lay some of these issues before the Journal of Child Care readership, because they are likely to be important players in the development of services for this group.

The special service problems of young adulthood have been described recently by myself and Doug Finlay in relation to Ontario’s youth services (Sullivan and Finlay, 1983) and by earlier commentators including Neufeldt (1979). There are currently a number of structural impediments to services for young adults hinging upon legislation mandating specific age cutoffs; economic and labour market realities of the eighties; and the particular mismatch between the developmental characteristics of young adulthood and conventional outpatient and residential services to children or adults. Neufeldt’s analysis focuses on the conception and development of a systemic and ecologically based comprehensive service continuum that follows young people through into adulthood.

Looking at whether or not young adulthood and its service delivery problems were ever thus will bring us through some contradictory positions in the papers that follow. Contradictions which stem in part from a wish to portray accurately the constancy of late adolescence alongside the change in social trends around them.

Elder (1980) has developed a theoretical perspective which is helpful in looking at constancy and change. Since the early twentieth century, theorists have looked at adolescence from two principal perspectives: developmental and social. Adolescence and young adulthood have been studied and typified by characteristics of the developing organism (physical, cognitive, moral), by social criteria that specify age categories and roles, and by the interaction of the social and developmental timetables.

Since the mid sixties, we have witnessed the addition of life span developmental frameworks that consider the place of these first two characteristics in historical time or cohort membership.

Now the adolescentologist has three strands of study that link age, social and life history, and historical time:

•  Developmental Time: focus on the process of ageing from birth to death. Focus on a particular point in the ageing process.

• Social Time: age patterning of social roles and events across multiple career phases such as leaving home, getting work, marriage, etc.

• Historical Time: birth year defines location in the historical process and memberships in specific cohorts.

John Kettle’s contribution focuses on the broad question of historical time and how post-war social and demographic change radically altered the social institutions of young adulthood. His uniquely Canadian analysis of the baby-boom sets up the very general picture of the social and demographic realities of the ‘Big Generation," those born between 1951 and 1966. Today, from the point of view of young adulthood, our sixteen to twenty-one year range covers the years 1964-1969. Our young adult group constitutes the tail end of the boomers and to some extent is riding in the wake of the baby-boom. To the extent that the young adult cohort of today is coming of age in the wake of the baby-boom, certain larger social trends are already different for this group, and John Kettle’s fascinating commentary may need some updating. His paper speaks for itself, however. and his observations, analysis, and speculations are provocative and controversial.

To a certain extent, Leon Muszynski’s paper picks up on John Kettle’s theme of the baby-boom being the only cohort that has grown up in a period of exceptional affluence. The economic expansion of the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies came to a screeching slowdown in 1982. A generation of older parental boomers looked at their children who are now facing relative economic hardship. These parents view their children with eyes coloured by the generalized expectations of rising affluence associated with the first three post-war decades. We find it hard to accept the reality of fewer jobs and fewer career options for our young. Leon’s work poses a whole range of implications related to Social Time. At this stage in the eighties the effects of the deindustrialization and transformation in Canada’s economic base are beginning to be felt in a significant way. The effects of a shrinking job market, economic pressures to stay home longer, and the development of myriad youth training and employment schemes remain to be seen. While the English economy is radically different from our own, the ~schemes" for jobless youth and the punk youth culture of the eighties stand in stark generational contrast to the social institutions typical of the "flower power" generation of the sixties and seventies. The return of poverty to our social welfare agenda highlights the economic downturn of the eighties and is currently stressing the social and economic programs which are the real fabric of our liberal welfare state (see for example ONDP, 1984). Leon’s paper puts into bold relief the inseparability of youth policy and larger economic and social policy. This relationship has also been emphasized by seasoned and moderate youth observers such as Hobbs and Robinson (1984). Current economic realities pose a challenge to policy makers to rethink and reinvest as it were in the training and employment opportunities afforded young people in planning the future productive strength of the nation.

Into this potentially disturbing perspective of the eighties teen cohort enters Saul Levine. Saul manages to cover Developmental, Social, and Historical Time in his view of adolescence today. In this he brings a unique and somewhat radically optimistic view of youth as not only being "ever thus," but "ever resourceful" people to be counted upon for their own sense of initiative and optimism. Saul acknowledges the gap in mental health and child care services to this age group, but focuses his discussion on the "continuum of the normal" and in particular on the social rite of leaving home. One may be critical of Saul’s approach because of his relative optimism and because of his developmentally invariant view of youth over historical time. It is hard, however, to challenge his position that (a) generally youth are more like their parents than like the more disturbing or colourful fringes of youth culture, and (b) that adolescence has had a common reputation throughout history. Recent survey data from Bibby Posterski (1984) of fifteen to nineteen-year-olds across Canada demonstrate this with compelling detail. While there are minor areas where teens are relatively more liberal or more conservative than their parents, they are very close to their parents in value orientation and remarkably optimistic about the future. The difference in outlook created by social class and religion appear more dramatic than those associated with some mythical "generation gap." Regional differences in optimism about the world of work in Bibby and Posterski’s survey reflected somewhat regional differences in actual labour markets.

The image of jobless youth of the eighties creating public disorder or chaos would seem to be unwarranted in Canada. In fact there seems to be historical evidence that periods of social change with youth unrest are characterized by cohorts of ascending size (Elder, 1980). We are witnessing declining cohort size in the eighties. The social unrest on university campuses in the sixties appears to be linked to the unprecedented rise of about 50 percent in the young adult population. The unrest would have looked radically different if the same size cohort was emerging in the eighties in times of relative economic hardship.

The location in a historical cohort is indeed one of the more interesting aspects of studying young adulthood. In a splendid Canadian study Katz (Katz and Davey, 1978) looked at youth and their life paths before (1851) and during early industrialization (1861). The concept that parental control was eroded during industrialization, for example, is clearly contradicted by Katz’s study which showed a strengthening of generational ties and enhanced parental power over teenage boys. Genuine archival research like the Katz study yield a far more complex picture of fluctuating historical and economic trends with patterns of time and place, social stratum, mode of control, and life stage than any invariant view of adolescence might suggest. The complex interaction of these variables and the straddling of multiple social timetables in different historical cohort studies is reviewed thoroughly by Elder (1980).

What Clive Chamberlain does in his paper is to narrow down the larger issues of Historical and Social Time to the special needs and stresses of young adulthood as a Developmental Time period. Fasick (1979) has nicely detailed the kinds of adult responsibilities and rights that young people in Canada assume between sixteen and twenty-one. All the major rights and responsibilities of adulthood are faced in this age group, with minor regional variations. What Clive highlights are the developmental "stragglers," the socially marginal and isolated young adults who stumble as the majority of young adults pass through to satisfactory assumption of adult roles and responsibilities. It is in the young adult group that depression and suicide, schizophrenia, violent crime, drug and alcohol problems emerge dramatically in response to different stresses on constitutionally sensitive youngsters. Clive’s program development and policy experience are evident as he underscores the service gap for this age group, and, like Alfred Neufeldt, calls for a complex service system that can "grow up" and "hang in" with developmental stragglers in this age group. Clive also notes the effect of articulate "yuppie" parents clamouring for day care support services while child welfare and mental health services to older youth risk further erosion during this time of restraint. It is during young adulthood that many major mental illnesses and social stressors typically emerge, and yet it is often here that our local service systems are least able to respond and intervene early and effectively.

Recent literature in the U.S. on the "Chronic Young Adult," sharpens the problems of service delivery for a generation of young mentally ill clients who have never been institutionalized, and who do not respond to traditional models of out-patient service delivery (Bachrach, 1981). The service needs of the marginal young adults of the eighties must be met with a service delivery system sensitized to their special problems, and child care professionals are in a leadership position to develop programs and inform policy makers of this need.

The papers that follow are not intended to focus on child care practice directly. No excuse can be offered for this. Nor are they intended to provide any comprehensive look at youth-related issues. Rather, the papers are the personal reflections of the contributors, most of whom are practitioners and all of whom have contributed in various ways to thinking on youth-related issues. The collection is intended to mark Youth Year and, in a straightforward way, stimulate some thinking about child care program initiatives for young adults. Perhaps they will help to move some small degree towards better services for the young adults who may have been eclipsed slightly in the positive hype of Youth Year.

Equality before and under law and equal protection and benefit of law. — (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Sec.15, enacted April 17, 1985. (italics added)

Bachrach, L. (1982). The Young Adult Chronic Patient: An Analytical Review of the Literature. Hospital and Community Psychiatry 33, pp. 189-197.

Bibby, R., and Posterski, D.C. (1985). The Emerging Generation: An Inside Look at Canada’s Teenagers. Toronto: Irwin Publishing.

Dacey, J.S. (1982). Adolescents Today. (2nd ed.). London: Scott Foresman & Co., pp.428-43².

Elder, G. (1980). Historical Time and the Study of Adolescence, in Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, by J. Adelson. Toronto: Wiley and Sons, pp.3-47.

Fasick, F. (1979). Acquisition of Adult Responsibilities and Rights in Adolescence, in Childhood and Adolescence in Canada. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, pp.119-136.

Glassner, B., and Freedman, J. (1979). Clinical Sociology. New York: Longman, p.² 10.

Hobbs, N., and Robinson, 5. (1984). Adolescent Development and Public Policy, in Annual Progress in Child Psychiatry and Child Development. New York: Bruner Mazel, pp.296-³²⁰.

Katz, M.B.,and Davey, IF. (1978). Youth and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City. American Journal of Sociology 84 (special supplement).

Neufeldt, A. Young Adulthood: The Age of Transition. Canada’s Mental Health 19, pp.18-22.

Sullivan, T., and Finlay, 0. (1983). Coming of Age in Ontario: The Child/Adult Mental Health Dilemma. Network (Canadian Mental Health Ontario), 3(4); 1-4.

The Other Ontario: A Report on Poverty in Ontario by the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP), 1984.

Youth In Canada: A New Statistical Perspective. (1984) Ministry of Supply and Services Canada.

Biographical Note