Living with Peter PanA) Social scientists are starting to realize that a permanent shift has taken place in the way we live our lives. In the past, people moved from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, but today there is a new, intermediate phase along the way. The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional period between adolescence and adulthood during which people put off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them. They’re betwixt and between. You could call them twixters.B) Maybe the twixters are in denial about growing up, but the rest of society is equally in denial about the twixters. Nobody wants to admit they’re here to stay, but that’s where all the evidence points. Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey, a large sociological data-gathering project run by the National Opinion Research Center, found that most people believe that the transition to adulthood should be completed by the age of 26, on average, and he thinks that number is only going up. “In another 10 or 20 years, we’re not going to be talking about this as a delay. We’re going to be talking about this as a normal trajectory (轨迹),” Smith says. “And we’re going to think about those people getting married at 18 and forming families at 19 or 20 as an abnormal historical pattern.”C) There may even be a biological basis to all this. The human brain continues to grow and change into the early 20s, according to Abigail Baird, who runs the Laboratory for Adolescent Studies at Dartmouth. “We as a society consider an individual at the age of 18 ready for adult responsibility,” Baird points out. “Yet recent evidence suggests that our neuropsychological development is many years from being complete. There’s no reason to think 18 is a magic number.” How can the twixters be expected to settle down when the gray matter in their central nervous system hasn’t?D) A new life stage is a major change, and the rest of society will have to change to make room for it. One response to this very new phenomenon is extremely old-fashioned: old-style apprenticeship (学徒) programs that give high school graduates a cheaper and more practical alternative to college. In 1996 Jack Smith, then CEO of General Motors, started Automotive Youth Educational Systems (AYES), a program that puts high school kids in shops alongside seasoned car mechanics. More than 7,800 students have tried it, and 98% of them have ended up working at the business where they apprenticed. “I knew this was my best way to get into a dealership,” says Chris Rolando, 20, an AYES graduate who works at one in Detroit. “My friends are still at pizza-place jobs and have no idea what to do for a living. I just bought my own house and have a career.”E) But success stories like Rolando’s are rare. Child welfare, the juvenile-justice system, special-education and support programs for young mothers usually cut off at age 18, and most kids in foster care get kicked out at 18 with virtually no safety net. “Age limits are like the time limits for welfare recipients,” says Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist who heads a research consortium called the MacArthur Network on Transitions to Adulthood. “But people are not necessarily able to transition into supportive services or connections to other systems.” And programs for the poor aren’t the only ones that need to grow up with the times. Only 54% of respondents in the Time poll were insured through their employers. That’s a reality that affects all levels of society, and policymakers need to strengthen that safety net.F) Most of the problems that twixters face are hard to see, and that makes it harder to help them. Twixters may look as if they have been overindulged, but they could use some good support. Psychologist Terri Apter’s research at Cambridge suggests that the more parents sympathize with their twixter children, the more they take time to discuss their twixters’ life goals, the more aid and shelter they offer them, the easier the transition becomes. “Young people know that their material life will not be better than their parents’,” Apter says. “They don’t expect a safer life than their parents had. They don’t expect more secure employment or finances. They have to put in a lot of work just to remain O.K.” Tough love may look like the answer, but it’s not what twixters need.G) The real heavy lifting may, above all, have to happen on the level of the culture itself. There was a time when people looked forward to taking on the responsibilities of adulthood. That time is past. Now our culture trains young people to fear it. “I don’t ever want a lawn,” says Gordon. “I don’t ever want to drive two hours to get to work. I do not want to be a parent. I mean, hell, why would I? There’s so much fun to be had while you’re young.” He does have a point. Twixters have all the privileges of grown-ups now but only some of the responsibilities.H) If twixters are ever going to grow up, they need the means to do it — and they will have to want to. There are joys and satisfactions that come with assuming adult responsibility, though you won’t see them on The Real World. To go to the movies or turn on the TV is to see a world where life ends at 30; these days, every movie is Logan’s Run. There are few road maps in the popular culture — and to most twixters, this is the only culture — to get twixters where they need to go. If those who are 30 and older want the rest of the world to grow up, they’ll have to show the twixters that it’s worth their while. “I went to a Poster Children concert, and there were 40-year-olds still rocking,” says Jennie Jiang. “It gave me hope.”1.Our society assumes a person of eighteen should take responsibility as an adult, but his or her biological development is actually not ready yet