What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?
Story by Rachel Wolfe, Wall Street Journal, 1/1/25
Americans in their 30s have never looked less like grown-ups.
Amid steep declines in homeownership, marriage and birth rates, economists have long been warning that young people are struggling to meet the milestones of adulthood. Although some 30-somethings are consciously choosing a less traditional path, many say these goals are simply out of reach.
“It feels like the instructions for how to live a good life don’t apply anymore,” says 38-year-old Cody Harding, who is single and lives with three roommates in Brooklyn. “And nobody has updated them.”
Now, as a mix of social and economic factors holds back an entire generation, what researchers once called a lag is starting to look more like a permanent state of arrested development.
“We’re moving from later to never,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He notes that the longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all.
A third of today’s young adults will never marry, projects conservative think tank the Institute for Family Studies, compared to less than a fifth of those born in previous decades. The share of childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have kids, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 37% to 47%, according to Pew Research Center.
“You can kick the can down the road, but only so far,” says Reeves.
The conventional explanation for what’s freezing young adults in place is that they can’t afford to grow up, given rising inflation and ballooning housing costs. Yet this doesn’t quite explain what’s going on.
It’s true that 30-somethings have had a run of tough economic luck. Many of them entered the job market during the Great Recession, rode out the pandemic by moving back in with their parents, and are now dealing with the worst housing market in 40 years. But the numbers paint a more complicated picture.
Median wages for full-time workers ages 35 to 44 are up 16% between 2000 and 2024, from $58,522 to $67,652 adjusted for inflation, according to the Labor Department. The overall wealth of 30-somethings, too, rose 66% between 1989 and 2022, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, from $62,000 to $103,000.
In many ways, this age group is in a better place financially, on average, than their parents were at this age. The problem is that they don’t seem to know it. Only 21% of adults in their 30s rated the overall economy as good or excellent last year, per the Federal Reserve, and economists say young adults are significantly more pessimistic about the future than prior generations were.
“They see the world they are going to live in 20 years from now as really screwed up,” says Brookings Institute economist Carol Graham, who studies well-being. She points to how climate change, political polarization, AI and a growing resentment of corporate power have made the future feel more uncertain.
Younger adults are far less likely than Americans over 50 to say achieving the American Dream of success from hard work is still a possibility, according to a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll in July. But here, too, the reality is more complicated. At least part of what’s stunting the growth of a generation of young people are outsized dreams of what a good life looks like.
“Our expectations are so much higher today,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on children and family. “Generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.”
To be sure, financial averages are just that. A sizable share of this generation is worse-off than their parents were. Young men in particular are struggling in the labor market. And some of the traditional goals of adulthood really have become more difficult to achieve. Student debt has more than doubled over the past two decades, yet a college degree is no guarantee of a well-paying job. Rising interest rates and dwindling supply have also put homeownership out of reach for a growing share of Americans. The median age of first-time homebuyers hit a record high of 38 this year, according to the National Association of Realtors, up from 35 in 2023 and 29 in 1981.
Still, growing up with less pressure to follow the same narrow route to adulthood imposed on their parents and grandparents—a career, spouse, house and kids all by age 35—has raised the bar for what these milestones look like, if they choose to hit them at all.
Stymied by this mix of high expectations and challenging economic circumstances, many 30-somethings sound disoriented and unsure about what it means to be a successful adult now.
After watching his parents raise three kids and buy a house on his parents’ salaries in retail and manufacturing, Cody Harding assumed that being the first in his family to earn a Bachelor’s degree would grant him an even better quality of life. Although he now makes around double what his parents did at the height of their careers combined, he’s disappointed by what it affords him in New York City.
Harding says graduating college in 2008, just as companies across the country were hemorrhaging funds and laying off workers, was the first sign that he seemed destined for an economically precarious adulthood. When he couldn’t put his double major in English and history to use, he waited tables and worked in construction.
“I never caught up,” he says. Harding entered law school to wait out the sluggish labor market, but emerged with $180,000 in student-loan debt. He now owes over $200,000, after making only the minimum payments.
Instead of being able to support a family or at least live on his own as a full-time lawyer, he’s paying $1,700 in monthly rent to live with roommates in Brooklyn. When it became clear his dreams of homeownership were not achievable in New York, he recently got help from his parents to close on a fixer-upper in his hometown of Easton, Pa. Like many of his peers, he earns extra income from a side hustle: in his case running a vintage furniture store.
Harding still hopes to get married and have children, but has grown disenchanted with a dating culture that he feels prizes short-term flings over long-term commitment. He’d also rather stay single than compromise on the wrong fit. Most of his friends are in the same state of suspended adolescence, he says, which sometimes makes it feel like time is standing still.
“It’s fine trying to reinvent what a modern life looks like, but I’m a little disappointed by everything that it lacks,” Harding says. “I’m sick of partying. I did that already. I want to grow up.”
Just over half of Americans between the ages of 30 and 40 were married as of last year, according to an analysis of American Community Survey data by Aspen Economic Strategy Group economist Luke Pardue. This is down from more than two thirds in 1990, when those in the middle of the cohort were born. The share of women in this age range who had ever given birth fell 7 percentage points between 2012 and 2022 alone, Current Population Survey data show, from 78% to 71%.
“Part of this is social expectations, part of this is shifting priorities and part of this is economic realities,” says Kearney at the University of Maryland, who has looked at how the same dynamic is playing out in high-income countries around the world. “But all together they seem to be pushing in the same direction, which is increased rates of staying single and staying childless.”
Even leaving the nest—long considered a prerequisite to full-fledged adulthood in the U.S.—is proving harder to pull off.
By the time Renata Leo’s parents were 31, the age she is now, they had gotten married, purchased a home and had her. Yet she is still sleeping in her childhood bedroom, gazing at the same unicorn wallpaper put up before she was born.
“Redecorating would mean accepting that I’m not leaving,” says Leo, who has been back home in Glassboro, N.J., since graduating college in 2015 with $20,000 in student-loan debt.
She was close to moving out in 2020, but the pandemic’s surging home prices derailed plans to buy a starter house with her then-fiancé. (He moved into her childhood bedroom with her before they broke up this past summer.) Since losing her full-time job at a startup in 2021 she’s been working part-time and has felt stuck, unsure of what she wants to do next.
“I feel like a failure,” she says, adding that a recent chance meeting with the principal of her high school, where she graduated as valedictorian, left her scrambling for how to describe what she’s been up to for the past 13 years. “I let the fact that I published a book do a lot of the heavy lifting,” she jokes.
Nearly 9% of those aged 30 to 40 still live with their parents, according to Pardue’s analysis of Census data, up from nearly 6% in 1990.
Renata’s parents, Ed and Paula Leo, 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.
“There’s no longer one right, certain path,” says Paula, a 61-year-old retired math teacher, who admits that she never even thought about whether she wanted to get married or become a mother—she just assumed that she would. Yet Paula recognizes that operating in an atmosphere with less pressure to conform or settle comes with its own costs. Having more options, she says, “makes it harder to know what to do.”
Renata acknowledges that it’s a privilege to be able to wait for a job she loves rather than take whatever’s offered. But she admits that the longer she stands by, a seeming bystander in her own life, the more hopeless she feels about ever launching at all.
“I still feel like a little kid,” she says.
By the time Semira Fuller’s mom was her age, 39, she was a home owner and a single mother of two. But even though Fuller’s roughly $100,000 salary as a payroll manager is more than her mom ever made when Fuller was growing up, she’s been disappointed by how little it buys in Los Angeles, where she lives with a roommate. “Everything feels like a struggle,” she says.
She knows her salary would go farther in her hometown of Philadelphia, but she prefers to stay in L.A. Inflation has raised the price of small luxuries, such as her Spotify subscription, but she doesn’t want to give them up.
“There isn’t any part of my life that doesn’t feel more expensive than it did two years ago,” she says.
Fuller says she enjoys meeting friends and waking up when she wants, which makes the upheaval of children unappealing. Motherhood, she says, is a “nonstarter.”
“Kids become the first priority,” says Fuller. “I’m still figuring myself out as a priority.”