GROWING UP IN AN AGE THAT FEARS ADULTHOOD

 

 

As a teacher, the end of the school year always brings the buzz of the Esame di Maturità. While I wasn’t directly involved in the exam commissions this year, I couldn't resist checking the exam papers assigned on the first day for the Italian essay. Among the several different options available to the students, the B3 task immediately caught my eye.

Ironically, I found myself thinking that the prompt—centered on the boundaries of maturity—was actually far more suitable for an adult to reflect on than a teenager! Yet, if I had been sitting at one of those desks taking the exam myself, that is absolutely the task I would have chosen. The prompt was based on Frank Furedi's book I confini contano (Boundaries Matter), which references Julie Beck's article in The Atlantic, "When Are You Really an Adult?", to show how contemporary culture portrays adulthood as a nuisance where independence becomes loneliness and responsibility turns into stress.

According to Furedi, contemporary culture tends to idealize youth while looking at maturity with suspicion. Childhood is associated with freedom, spontaneity and possibility; adulthood, on the contrary, often appears linked to routine, stress, and responsibility. In this sense, the figure of the "adultescent"—someone who wishes to prolong adolescence indefinitely—has become a symbol of our age.

There is undoubtedly some truth in this observation. Popular culture celebrates youth to an unprecedented degree. Fashion, entertainment and social media encourage people to remain forever young, while the traditional markers of adulthood seem increasingly postponed. Many young people leave home later, achieve financial independence later and delay long-term commitments.

However, I do not believe that the problem is simply a refusal to grow up. The reality is more complex. In previous generations the transition to adulthood was marked by relatively clear milestones: completing education, finding stable work, forming a family. Today these paths are less predictable. Economic uncertainty and rapid social change have made the journey more complicated.

This reality is precisely what I am preparing to explore with my incoming English Literature students as they get ready for their own Esame di Maturità. For 18-year-olds facing this symbolic threshold, the question is not an academic exercise—it is their lived reality. As I build our first course module, titled The Difficult Task of Growing Up, I keep coming back to what our institutional spaces actually incentivize.

Education should certainly contribute to the formation of mature human beings. Yet the most important dimensions of maturity—integrity, responsibility, resilience, generosity, self-knowledge—are precisely those that resist easy measurement. The challenge for schools is not whether they should cultivate these qualities, but whether they should pretend to quantify them.

This raises a deeper question: what does it actually mean to be an adult ? Age alone cannot be the answer. Every one of us has met teenagers who display remarkable maturity and adults who behave irresponsibly. Nor can adulthood be reduced to financial independence or family status. Many people who do not fit traditional models nevertheless demonstrate wisdom, reliability and commitment.

Perhaps maturity begins when individuals recognise that freedom and responsibility are inseparable. Children are mainly concerned with what others owe them. Mature adults gradually learn to ask what they owe to others. They understand that choices have consequences and that personal fulfilment cannot be separated from commitment, empathy and responsibility.

Seen from this perspective, adulthood is not a burden to be avoided but an achievement. It does involve sacrifice, uncertainty and effort. Yet it also offers something childhood cannot provide: the possibility of shaping one's own life and contributing to the lives of others. The boundary between generations may indeed be less clear than it once was. Nevertheless, the challenge of growing up remains essential. 

Every generation must discover its own answer to the question: not simply when are you really an adult, but what kind of adult do you want to become?