Janie B. Cheaney: Failing to launch

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 18th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney now with thoughts on what’s ailing the rising generation.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: Kids these days—we’re told they’re anxious, depressed, and suicidal, more so than teens at any other time in modern history. But sadly, surveys indicate there’s an age group even more anxious and depressed. It’s Young Adults: the high school and college grads recently launched into independence. Or rather, shoved before they’re ready, into a world that isn’t ready for them.

Think about it: from birth to around age 18, you're someone else's problem, namely your parents’. Then you slip the loop and become your own problem. Traditionally, the 20s are when crucial decisions come thick and fast, such as the choice of a life partner, or a career, or when to start a family. The 20s are when you make the choices that you’ll spend your 30s and 40s learning to live with.

I launched upon my own adulthood by dropping out of college to marry a young man who soon after dropped out of grad school. Those were dark days in U.S. history, what with domestic terrorism, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, double-digit inflation, and the Arab oil embargo. But we owned no radio or television and remained blissfully unaware of most of the news.

We moved from Texas to Tennessee to California to New Mexico and back to Texas with everything we could stuff into a 1963 Volkswagen bug. Casually making choices that would later make us. But young-adult choices seem weightier now than they used to be. An extensive Harvard study conducted in 2022 found almost a third of participants in the 18 to 24 age range reporting depression and anxiety. A Gallup poll from last year found the under-30 crowd as the age group most likely to feel disconnected and lonely.

The normal goals of young adulthood are drifting out of reach for many: rising rents break the budget, rewarding work is harder to find, meaningful relationships are difficult to forge, especially in the absence of supportive communities like church. I also wonder if a lot of young adults have built up grandiose expectations for the future without preparing for mundane necessities like doing their own laundry. If Mom still picks up dirty clothes for the roughly half of 18 to 24 year-olds living with their parents, those skills may remain in limbo.

Besides all that, the world is too much with them, to paraphrase William Wordsworth. It’s a scary place, especially for those without a sense of community and purpose. Young adults report worrying about gun violence, climate change, crime, raging political feuds, corruption in government, and everything else that fills 24-hour news cycles and social-media feeds.

“Just grow up” is cold advice. When my husband and I were learning to be grown ups, our parents and church community provided practical help like loans, short-term work, and godly counsel.

Growing up has always been hard, but it’s harder in different ways today, and Baby Boomers and GenXers have failed to provide a stable launch pad. Lord willing, today's young adults will eventually launch, but in the meantime they deserve our sympathy. And sometimes a helping hand.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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