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America has been inconsistent at best when it comes to deciding what 18- to 21-year-olds are too young, or just old enough, to do.

A Selective Service lottery in Washington on July 17, 1941. Eighteen-year-old Americans could be drafted into the armed forces, while the minimum voting age was 21. Credit... Associated Press

The proposed legislation was never meant to be taken seriously, said John Rodgers, a Vermont state senator and a fierce gun rights advocate.

"In light of the dangerous and life-threatening consequences of cellphone use by young people, it is clear that persons under 21 years of age are not developmentally mature enough to safely possess them," Mr. Rodgers wrote in a bill this month proposing to outlaw the use of cellphones by anyone under 21.

It was in part, he said, a rebuke of a law Vermont passed in 2018 that banned the sale of firearms to most people under 21, and an attempt to show the absurdity of allowing 18-year-olds to go to war but forbidding them from enjoying the constitutional rights and vices afforded to older Americans.

Mr. Rodgers, who said his family had been hunting the woods of the Northeast Kingdom since the 1800s, was quickly bombarded with angry tweets, emails and calls to his home that accused him of trying to create a nanny state. His critics missed the point, he said.

"There are all these pushes around some parts of the country for 16-year-olds to vote but we're saying they're not mature enough to smoke or purchase a gun. So which is it?" said Mr. Rodgers. "When are you really an adult?"

It is a question that has possessed both poets and lawmakers.

But there is not much clarity in state laws. In Alaska, teenagers as young as 14 can get married with a court order. Only a handful of states allow drinking under 21 and that is under strict circumstances, like when a parent or legal guardian is present.

Eighteen-year-old adults can run for office, go to strip clubs, be sentenced to life in prison, and volunteer to go to war or be drafted, but as of last December, they cannot vape or smoke tobacco products.

And since 1984, when states began raising the legal age of drinking to 21 from 18 in exchange for federal highway funds - in some cases barely a decade after lowering it - they have not been able to buy a beer at a bar in most of the United States, a restriction that has infuriated college students ever since.

"If 18-year-olds are burdened with the responsibility of adulthood, they should be afforded some of its privileges," said Charlotte Lawson, a 21-year-old fourth-year student at the University of Virginia who wrote an opinion piece in the campus paper in 2018 calling for the drinking age to be lowered from 21.

"It's interesting these are people who work full-time jobs, pay their own rent, pay taxes and are eligible to vote," she said. "Yet none of this constitutes adequate proof that a person is responsible enough to drink."

Charlotte Lawson, 21, a fourth-year student at the University of Virginia says there are inconsistencies in society about adulthood. Like many others, she pointed out that the drinking age is higher than the age to join the armed services. Credit... Julia Rendleman for The New York Times

Most laws that govern age restrictions are set by the states.

For much of the 20th century, the minimum age for drinking in the United States dovetailed with the voting age, said Jonathan Parent, a professor of political science at Le Moyne College in Syracuse.

After the end of Prohibition in 1933, most states set the drinking age at 21, which was also the minimum voting age at the time.

Lawmakers reasoned that if you were old enough to vote, you were old enough to drink, Mr. Parent said.

That philosophy continued in 1971, when Congress lowered the voting age to 18 in response to fury over the draft during the Vietnam War, which conscripted thousands of men between 18 and 21 into war.

States, in turn, lowered the drinking age to 18, Mr. Parent said.

President Ronald Reagan signed legislation raising the national drinking age to 21 in 1984. Credit... Associated Press

But in 1984, President Ronald Reagan began pushing hard for states to raise their drinking age, citing what he called a "great national problem" of drinking and driving by teenagers.

In July of that year, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which required states to raise the age of drinking to 21 or risk a 10 percent cut in their federal highway funds.

The law put the United States at odds with the rest of the Western world, where in some European countries people as young as 16 can drink wine and beer.

"It's pretty unique to us," Mr. Parent said. "It probably goes back to more of a Puritan idea in the United States. This is one of the only countries in the Western world that banned alcohol."

It's a question that Apryl Alexander, a psychology professor at the University of Denver, often gets from her graduate students and that has become even more fraught with the growing research around the development of the juvenile brain.

"We don't have a clear answer for them," Ms. Alexander said. The scientific consensus that most brains do not fully develop until age 25 has led to a host of reforms in the criminal justice system and reexaminations about how society should punish young adults.

But it has also fed the confusion over what young adults should be allowed to do when scientists know that they use less restraint and discipline than older people, said Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University and founder of the school's Child and Family Advocacy Clinic.

"We're constantly trying to balance the rights to protection and the rights to participation," said Ms. Binford. "We are a society that loves its liberty, but we're also a society that recognizes that children are unique and special and deserving of protection."

A peace group picketed the Draft Board in Great Neck, N.Y., in October 1967. Credit... Stan Wolfson/Newsday RM, via Getty Images

That tension can leave young people feeling disenfranchised and less likely to participate in civic life, said D. Scott Foster, who was 22 in 2010 when he ran successfully for City Council in Williamsburg, Va.

"They don't see themselves as fit for those roles or having an impact," said Mr. Foster, who is now 32. "If laws are skewed against young folks and public perception is skewed against young folks, it's that much harder to get involved. It takes extra effort and willpower."

Benming Zhang, who was elected to the Williamsburg City Council in 2016 during his final undergraduate year at William & Mary in Virginia, said he was surprised to encounter more skepticism about his campaign from people his own age than older residents of the city.

"The first thing my classmates thought was, 'Who is this kid who is running for office?'" said Mr. Zhang, now 25. "It's that disconnect of seeing one of their own, a like-aged person, sitting on that dais with older, largely white male counterparts.Can we envision someone like us sitting on that dais?"

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When Are You Really an Adult? (Published 2020)

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America has been inconsistent at best when it comes to deciding what 18- to 21-year-olds are too young, or just old enough, to do. The proposed legislation was never meant to be taken seriously, said John Rodgers, a Vermont state senator and a fierce gun rights advocate.

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In the article ¨When Are You Really an Adult?¨ Maria Cramer says that the drinking age should be lowered because people are considered adults when they turn 18, but still are not allowed to drink or buy alcohol until they turn 21.

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¨But there is not much clarity in state laws. In Alaska, teenagers as young as 14 can get married with a court order. Only a handful of states allow drinking under 21 and that is under strict circumstances, like when a parent or legal guardian is present.¨ (Cramer)

¨´It’s interesting these are people who work full-time jobs, pay their own rent, pay taxes and are eligible to vote,´ she said. ´Yet none of this constitutes adequate proof that a person is responsible enough to drink.´¨ (Cramer)

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I agree with this article because when people turn 18 they can be sentenced to life in prison, get a full time job, run for office, and go to war, but are not allowed to drink until they are 21.

This article links to an example from the book Night that we read before because Elie Wiesel is forced into a new life of hard work, abuse, and terrible danger at only 15 years old. This forces him to grow up very quickly and act like he is an adult when he is still only a child.

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Under most laws, young people are recognized as adults at age 18. But emerging science about brain development suggests that most people don't reach full maturity until the age 25. Guest host Tony Cox discusses the research and its implications with Sandra Aamodt, neuroscientist and co-author of the book Welcome to Your Child's Brain.

TONY COX, HOST:

I'm Tony Cox and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Michel Martin is away. We'd like to spend this part of the program talking about the passage from childhood to adulthood and how that may be tougher for one distinct group of young people.

Most of the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood are legally granted by the age of 18. That's when you can vote, enlist in the military, move out on your own, but is that the true age of maturity? A growing body of science says, no. That critical parts of the brain involved in decision-making are not fully developed until years later at age 25 or so.

In a moment, we'll hear about how child advocates are hoping to use this research to change the laws about their foster care. But first, to learn more about adolescent brain development and maturity, we are joined now by neuroscientist, Sandra Aamodt. She is the coauthor of the book, "Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College."

Sandra, welcome to the program. It's nice to have you.

DR. SANDRA AAMODT: It's nice to be here.

COX: Is this idea that the brains of 18 year olds aren't fully developed a matter of settled science?

AAMODT: Yes. The car rental companies got to it first, but neuroscientists have caught up and brain scans show clearly that the brain is not fully finished developing until about age 25.

COX: To not be too clinical in the spin that we put on this, what parts of the brain are we talking about and what changes happen between the ages of 18 and, let's say, 25?

AAMODT: So the changes that happen between 18 and 25 are a continuation of the process that starts around puberty, and 18 year olds are about halfway through that process. Their prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed. That's the part of the brain that helps you to inhibit impulses and to plan and organize your behavior to reach a goal.

And the other part of the brain that is different in adolescence is that the brain's reward system becomes highly active right around the time of puberty and then gradually goes back to an adult level, which it reaches around age 25 and that makes adolescents and young adults more interested in entering uncertain situations to seek out and try to find whether there might be a possibility of gaining something from those situations.

COX: So this is important. Are the physiological changes in the brain, in terms of the development of young people, as significant and impactful as the cultural changes and environmental changes that they go through vis-a-vis peer pressure things of that sort?

AAMODT: Well, actually, one of the side effects of these changes in the reward system is that adolescents and young adults become much more sensitive to peer pressure than they were earlier or will be as adults.

So, for instance, a 20 year old is 50 percent more likely to do something risky if two friends are watching than if he's alone.

COX: Is there a difference between males and females with regard to their brain development, particularly in this age category?

AAMODT: Females' brains develop about on average two years earlier than male brains, so you're more likely to have a late developing male brain than female.

COX: So when females say they're smarter than guys, it really is true?

AAMODT: Especially around about the age of 15 or so. Yes.

COX: What does this mean? In a minute, we're going to be hearing from some advocates who think that the foster care system needs to be changed, in that in some states, when you reach the age of 18, you are booted out of foster care and their argument is based on some of the research that you are now citing that these young people are not really ready for the adult world.

What is the impact for someone who lives in a foster care kind of setting as far as their brain development is concerned?

AAMODT: One of the things that deprived childhood causes is problems with prefrontal cortex function, so somebody who has had an unstable home life is more likely to have trouble with planning and organizing behavior and with inhabiting impulses than somebody who has had a stable life.

COX: Would you say, based on the research that you are now citing, that it would make more sense to have the legal age become 25 instead of 18 or 21 in some cases?

AAMODT: I think it makes sense to have different ages for different functions. Obviously some 18 year olds are competent to go out into the world and handle things by themselves and some of them aren't. It would be nice if we had a little more flexibility to distinguish the two in the legal system.

COX: Final thing is, if these age limits are not adjusted to take into account the effect that the research has shown, what is the price - if I can put it that way - that society will end up paying down the road? I know that's a pretty large question. But another way of saying it is how important is it for us to address this and do something about it now?

AAMODT: Many of the costs of adolescents are actually - what we think of as the costs of adolescence, the risks of crime and car accidents and all the crazy things that adolescents do are actually more issues with young adults, people in the 18 to 25 age range, largely because they have more opportunities to get into these kinds of trouble because they have less parental supervision than the younger adolescents do.

COX: Sandra Aamodt is a neuroscientist and the co-author of "Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College." She joined us from Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, California.

Sandra, thank you very much.

AAMODT: Thank you.

Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years

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Under most laws, young people are recognized as adults at age 18. But emerging science about brain development suggests that most people don't reach full maturity until the age 25. Guest host Tony Cox discusses the research and its implications with Sandra Aamodt, neuroscientist and co-author of the book Welcome to Your Child's Brain.

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In the NPR interview completed by Tony Cox titled "Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years" Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist, argues that a person is not an adult at the age of 18, but instead reaches adulhood after 25 when their brain is fully developed.

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"So the changes that happen between 18 and 25 are a continuation of the process that starts around puberty, and 18 year olds are about halfway through that process. Their prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed. That's the part of the brain that helps you to inhibit impulses and to plan and organize your behavior to reach a goal" (Aamodt).

"for instance, a 20 year old is 50 percent more likely to do something risky if two friends are watching than if he's alone" (Aamodt).

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My thoughts on this aritle are that I agree because if an 18 year olds brain is only half developed they should not be able to do everything that someone over 25 can. This article links to an example from the book Night that we read before because Elie Wiesel was fored to work long, hard hours, being treated like an adult when he was only 15.

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Starting in 1995, psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD, interviewed 300 young people ages 18 to 29 in cities around the nation over five years, asking them questions about what they wanted out of life.

Despite stark differences in their social backgrounds and likely economic prospects, Arnett was struck by the similar answers he heard from his young respondents.

They shared a perception of "feeling in between"--knowing they were pulling clear of the struggles of adolescence and starting to feel responsible for themselves, but still closely tied to their parents and family.

They also reported pondering their personal identity, a theme that surprised Arnett, who thought most would have settled that question as adolescents.

Working from those interviews and examining broad demographic indicators, Arnett proposed a new period of life-span development he calls "emerging adulthood."

Arnett, a professor of psychology at Clark University currently teaching as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, coined the term in his book "Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Though the Twenties" (Oxford University Press, 2004).

He describes emerging adulthood as the time from the end of adolescence to the young-adult responsibilities of a stable job, marriage and parenthood and has made it the subject of a new APA book, "Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century," co-edited with Jennifer Lynn Tanner, PhD.

The book claims the phenomenon has only arisen in the past few decades in the United States in response to social and economic changes, and it urges continuing scholarship examining the nature of life and paths of development for emerging adults.
Five features of emerging adults
As Arnett describes it, emerging adulthood can be defined as an:

Age of identity exploration. Young people are deciding who they are and what they want out of work, school and love.

Age of instability. The post-high school years are marked by repeated residence changes, as young people either go to college or live with friends or a romantic partner. For most, frequent moves end as families and careers are established in the 30s.

Age of self-focus. Freed of the parent- and society-directed routine of school, young people try to decide what they want to do, where they want to go and who they want to be with--before those choices get limited by the constraints of marriage, children and a career.

Age of feeling in between. Many emerging adults say they are taking responsibility for themselves, but still do not completely feel like an adult.

Age of possibilities. Optimism reigns. Most emerging adults believe they have good chances of living "better than their parents did," and even if their parents divorced, they believe they'll find a lifelong soul mate.

Arnett's research shows that emerging adults want a lot out of life--a job that's well-paid and personally meaningful and a lasting bond with a partner. Many might be headed for disappointment, he says, noting that most employers simply want someone who can get a job done and almost half of all marriages end in divorce.

"If happiness is the difference between what you expect out of life and what you actually get, a lot of emerging adults are setting themselves up for unhappiness because they expect so much," he says.
Larger trends at work
Arnett says emerging adulthood is tied to larger historical social trends in American society, noting that 50 years ago, the median age for marriage was 22 for men and 20 for women.

Now, the median age for marriage has climbed past 28 for men and edged above 24 for women.

One reason young people marry later is that a much larger percentage of young people attend some form of college, creating a longer transition time between adolescence and adulthood, Arnett says.

Before 1944 and the passage of the GI Bill of Rights for returning World War II veterans, only a small percentage of high school graduates went to college, an educational experience mainly reserved for men. Now, a majority of young people get some college experience in one form or another, whether it's a four-year residential school or a community college.

Moreover, women now make up a majority of college undergraduates, and many want to build a career before they marry and have children, Arnett says. The development of the birth control pill helped drive the change, Arnett says. Decades ago, young people got married rather then face the risks of pregnancy outside marriage. Now, sexual relationships outside of marriage are accepted as natural by many people.
Some prosper; some struggle
Another marker of emerging adulthood is heterogeneity, says Arnett, in terms of the sheer multitude of paths young people can take and their widely varying levels of success.

Given some emerging adults' struggles, Arnett sees the need for greatly expanded societal efforts to help them navigate the transition into careers and family. He believes such efforts would pay off, given the self-awareness people develop in their 20s and their willingness to change.

"If you provide them with resources, they're much more likely to say, 'How can I improve my life?'" Arnett says.

He hopes the book and other efforts, such as the future development of a society for studying emerging adulthood, will build a community of scholars devoted to studying the period of development. Arnett and fellow scholars currently discuss ideas through the Emerging Adulthood Special Interest Group, established through the Society for Research on Adolescence.

The group organized two academic conferences exploring aspects of emerging adulthood and a third is planned for February 2007 in Tucson, Arizona.

The question of why some emerging adults do well, why some struggle and what can be done to help more make a successful transition is taken up by several book contributors.

Tanner, co-editor of the APA book and an assistant research professor in the School of Social Work at Simmons College, argues that the heterogeneity Arnett cites can be explained by the foundation laid in childhood and adolescence.

As she describes it, how well an adolescent makes the transition through young adulthood into adulthood and becomes a fully independent person depends in large part on the right balance of the adolescent pushing for independence and parents and society giving the correct amount of support--not pushing too hard or holding back too much, she says.

Many emerging adults who face problems becoming independent have faced past challenges meeting developmental tasks for one reason or another, she says.

"There are enormous costs to young people who are not equipped to 'plug in' to adult roles and responsibilities," Tanner says.

Jean S. Phinney, PhD, a psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles, writes on emerging adulthood's different features in ethnic-minority groups. Both for cultural and economic reasons, many young people from ethnic-minority groups tend to take on adult responsibilities earlier, contributing to the family income and taking care of siblings, sometimes at the cost of slowing down their own schooling, Phinney says.

During emerging adulthood, ethnic minorities have to deal with the larger culture and figure out their own identity in the context of the larger society. For children of immigrants, that can be especially challenging, she says.

"I think it can be harder for minorities who come from a culture where the expectations of what you should do are very strong," she says.

Another book contributor, Stephen F. Hamilton, PhD, a professor of human development at Cornell University, focuses on young people who can't afford college or who don't move into vocational programs. Many in that group languish in the low-paid jobs of the secondary labor market, bouncing from one low-skilled, dead-end job to another, Hamilton says.

"They end up doing this work their whole lives," he says.

Hamilton thinks there's a missing institution in American life--one devoted to helping young people join the primary labor market of decently paid jobs with benefits and a chance for advancement.

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A new book makes the case for a phase of development between adolescence and adulthood.

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In this article titled "Emerging adults: The in-between age" Christopher Munsey talks about the feeling of being between childhood and adulthood. Most of the people that feel this way end up going to do low paying work and staying at that job for the rest of their lives.

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"They shared a perception of "feeling in between"--knowing they were pulling clear of the struggles of adolescence and starting to feel responsible for themselves, but still closely tied to their parents and family." (Munsey)

"He describes emerging adulthood as the time from the end of adolescence to the young-adult responsibilities of a stable job, marriage and parenthood"(Munsey)

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My thoughts on this article are that I agree because if people feel like they can't go to school because they have to focus on being an adult and taking care of themselves, they will end up not being paid well, resulting in them having to stay with their parents for much longer.

This article links back to the book Part Time Indian because the main character, Junior, is trying to be someone he is not. Junior doesn't get what he is supposed to out of his experience at Reardan because he is so worried about what other people think about him. This is like real life because if 18 year olds have to be focused on making the change from childhood to adulthood they won't be able to focus on school or getting a good job, resulting in them having to live off of their parents for much longer than they would if they didn't have to worry about taking care of themselves.