Remaining in Neverland

In the classic children’s tale Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie dramatizes the struggle that every child faces in coming of age. Peter famously declares his intention to “never grow up,” preferring to inhabit Neverland, the realm of innocence, play, and endless possibility. While he does his best to persuade the protagonist Wendy to join him in perpetual childhood, she ultimately accepts the call to return to the real world and prepare to accept adulthood’s mantles of responsibility.

Today, fewer and fewer Americans are following Wendy’s example, opting instead to remain with Peter in Neverland: never marrying, never having children, and sometimes never even leaving their parents’ basement.

A thought-provoking recent Wall Street Journal feature, “What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?” summarizes the disturbing trends: plunging rates of marriage and family formation, a near-majority of 18- to 34-year-olds who see no reason to ever have kids, and a country in which nearly a tenth of 30- to 40-year-olds still live with their parents—and seeks to grapple with what is behind them. Predictably, the writer focuses on financial factors, but with some puzzlement, given that young adults are, by most measures, significantly richer than their far more self-reliant parents and grandparents were at the same stage of life. What explains our generation’s failure to launch?

To be sure, financial factors cannot be dismissed. While it may be true that inflation-adjusted median wages for most demographics are still generally rising, it is also true that they are rising much more slowly than they once did. In a culture accustomed to high-speed technological growth, decreasing acceleration can feel like stagnation and decline. More importantly, while inflation adjustment takes into account a huge array of goods and services (more than 80,000, in fact), not all of these loom equally large when launching into life. Those that matter most of all—like the cost of buying a home—have risen far more rapidly, so that a rising share of young people feel priced out of the ordinary building blocks for middle-class adulthood, as American Compass has shown with its illuminating Cost of Thriving Index.

That said, we are social beings, and we define success less in dollars and cents than through the sidelong glance: Can we keep up with the Joneses? The problem is that today, the Joneses are on Instagram, offering us a carefully curated picture of a happy life filled with wine bars and beach vacations. In the digital world, we are bombarded with glimpses of what everyone else is up to, and since people are more likely to share their successes than their trials and failures, everyone else seems to be doing better than us. On Pinterest, there are no ugly houses. No wonder that, as the WSJ reports, “many 30-somethings sound disoriented and unsure about what it means to be a successful adult now.”

Still, this disorientation has a yet deeper cause, one that will be very hard to reverse. Consider the story of Renata Leo, a 31-year-old profiled in the article who still sleeps in her childhood bedroom (complete with unicorn wallpaper). While she reports “feel[ing] like a failure,” her parents, according to the article, like to think they are helping her by giving her time to find a dream career: “Renata’s parents … say they want their daughter to have the freedom to pursue the life she wants rather than feeling, like they did, that she should submit to any job as long as it pays something.”

Until quite recently, every child looked toward adulthood with a gaze narrowed by constraints. Some constraints were provided by family and community, which prescribed roles, duties, and expectations for eldest sons, eldest daughters, and all the rest. Some constraints were a matter of hard economic reality: Mom and Dad couldn’t take care of you forever, so you’d better find a job, any job, and start climbing a ladder even if you had to start at a low rung. Today, however, most of these constraints have been removed. Ironically, our increasing material prosperity has made it harder for children to launch into adulthood because it has reduced the pressure on them to do so. They can afford to wait for a better job offer, and their parents are happy to oblige them.

Worse still, like Renata’s parents, many baby boomers removed the burden of social expectations and duties from their children (including the duty to provide grandchildren) in the name of freedom. But it turns out that there is no freedom to move in zero gravity—you just float aimlessly. By refusing to weigh their children down with norms and hard economic realities, parents have left them unable to stand at all on their own two feet. If our generation is to avoid being trapped in Neverland, it will have to learn that sometimes limiting your options is the only way to discover the options really worth living for.