What happened to all of the grownups?

Do you ever get the sense that people are not coping as well with life as they used to? Does it feel as though there are fewer grownups around?

I keep asking myself these questions. We have extraordinary medical care, technology and material comforts, at least compared with most of human history. We also face serious threats and enormous opportunities. What worries me is whether we have enough people who can stay steady, work together and take responsibility when the next decision is bigger than any one of us.

That worry is a hypothesis, not a census result. Nobody has counted grownups across generations, and nostalgia has a terrible record as a research method. We encounter many more people’s worst moments through screens than our grandparents ever did. Perhaps poor behaviour has become more visible rather than more common. Before we announce the disappearance of the grownups, we need to decide what we mean by one.

For this blog, a grownup is someone who can usually soothe themselves when stressed and regulate what they do next. They do necessary things when nobody is watching. They have a sense of themselves and of belonging to a wider society. They can value their own identity without treating somebody else’s as an insult. They respect rules that help people live together, while remaining capable of questioning bad ones. Needing help does not disqualify anyone. Knowing when to seek it is often a particularly grownup act.

An adult-child, by contrast, expects other people to absorb the consequences of their impulses. Discomfort becomes a reason to abandon a commitment; a rule is either an intolerable constraint or a weapon to use against somebody else. They want the benefits of belonging without accepting many of its obligations. This describes behaviour, not a permanent category of person. All of us can regress towards it when we are frightened, exhausted or overwhelmed.

I naturally think I qualify as a grownup. I am going to hang on tight to my self-ascribed grownupness, even though I suspect other people might supply useful counterexamples. Psychology offers a reason to be suspicious of my confidence: the fundamental attribution error is our tendency to explain another person’s behaviour by their character while overlooking the situation around them. When I lose my patience, I can see the pressure I was under. When you lose yours, I may just see a person behaving badly.

If I want to know where the grownups went, I have to apply that lesson consistently. It is too easy to put an entire generation in the dock and forget to ask what its members were asked to do, what support they had, and what their society rewarded. The generation I most admire makes an illuminating starting point.

How a generation learned responsibility

In The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw honours Americans who came of age during the Great Depression and fought or supported the effort in the Second World War. Their courage, practical competence and sense of duty deserve admiration. Their parents had lived through the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, and many young people then encountered scarcity, service and existential danger for themselves.

It is tempting to imagine that hardship simply made them grow up. Hardship can also break people. What made collective responsibility possible was a combination of necessity and organisation: families depended on contributions, institutions asked for service, and wartime systems coordinated sacrifice towards a shared end. Those institutions were far from fair to everyone. Women and racial minorities contributed while being denied many of the rewards and freedoms promised by the society they helped defend.

This matters because it changes what we can learn from Brokaw’s examples. We need not reproduce a depression or a world war to help people become capable. We can notice that responsibility was expected, practised and recognised in a setting where many people could see what their effort was for. The question is what happened as those settings changed after the war.

Expanding prosperity gave more families choices their parents could scarcely have imagined. That was real progress. It also made consumption a larger part of how people described themselves. By the 1950s, advertisers treated teenagers as a distinct market, studying what they bought and addressing them directly. Buying the right thing could help you belong, or prove that you were different.

Teenagers did not suddenly stop listening to their parents. Historical research on postwar families finds plenty of cooperation between generations. Nor was wanting personal freedom a failure of adulthood. The shift I am interested in is subtler. A commercial culture learned to offer young people an identity they could acquire quickly, while competence and belonging still required time, effort and other people.

Think of the difference between buying the equipment for an activity and becoming somebody who can actually do it. One purchase gives you an immediate story about yourself. The other takes practice, correction and, often, the patience of a mentor. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the purchase. The trouble begins when the story is offered as a substitute for the work.

That gap between the identity we are sold and the agency we experience helps explain why greater choice does not necessarily leave us more secure. In 1959, sociologist Melvin Seeman separated alienation into powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and estrangement from oneself. These are different ways of losing a workable connection to the world around us. His paper identified meanings of alienation; it did not prove that postwar young people were more alienated than their parents.

Seeman nevertheless helps me ask a sharper question. If I can choose among a thousand versions of myself, but have little influence over the institutions I depend on, how free do I feel? If I am constantly encouraged to stand out, but cannot find a dependable place to belong, what do I owe anybody else? The answers depend on how freedom is joined to competence and connection.

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan describe autonomy, competence and relatedness as basic needs that support healthy development. Their research does not establish the history of postwar adulthood, but it clarifies the mechanism I have in mind. A person needs room to choose, opportunities to become capable, and relationships in which those choices and capabilities matter. Selling autonomy while neglecting the other two is a poor recipe for a grownup.

Freedom and the work of stewardship

The demands for freedom in the 1960s make more sense when we remember those other needs. Civil rights campaigners and others challenged rules that denied people agency and belonging. I would not trade those gains for a romantic version of the 1950s. Indeed, changing an unjust rule can be one of the most grownup things a person does. It requires taking responsibility for what will replace it.

That responsibility is easy to overlook when freedom is presented mainly as an escape from constraints. Consider Altamont, the disastrously organised free concert in December 1969 where Meredith Hunter was killed. The event did not literally end the Summer of Love, which had been two years earlier, or define everyone in the counterculture. It showed that inviting an enormous crowd to share an ideal does not remove the need for planning, safety and accountability. Somebody still has to do the unglamorous work.

The unglamorous work is not nearly as marketable as the spectacle of rebellion. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank shows how advertisers incorporated images of nonconformity into the business of selling goods. You could express your independence by purchasing it. The market did not have to defeat the language of freedom; it could make that language part of the sales pitch.

I do not take this to mean that every hippie became a neoliberal in middle age. Many of the people who wanted greater social freedom continued to work for solidarity. The more interesting connection is between two ways of treating choice as an end in itself. One promises that our possessions will make us independent. The other assumes that making people choose as consumers will make social systems work better.

That second idea acquired far greater political force as market reforms spread from the late 1970s, including after Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979. Privatisation, the sale of council houses and policies encouraging individual financial responsibility changed the relationship between citizens, public institutions and risk. These reforms had different effects for different people, and they were shaped by politicians and voters across generations. Research on people who came of age during the Thatcher years also suggests that their formative political circumstances affected later values. Blaming Boomers as a single group would repeat the attribution error with which I began. Historical research on Thatcher’s policies and cohort research describe a more complicated story.

One consequence of that story is worth considering even if we disagree about individual policies. Telling people to manage more of life for themselves may increase formal choice while reducing practical agency when they lack the time, money, knowledge or reliable institutions to make those choices well. Self-reliance becomes an instruction issued by the people who have already moved the supports out of reach.

That does not make people less capable by definition. It does mean they must spend more effort staying steady before they can offer steadiness to someone else. The way a society distributes risk therefore shapes the way its children, and its adults, learn to cope with it.

Where adulthood gets its practice

Jonathan Haidt adds childhood to this account. In The Anxious Generation, he argues that children became less free to explore the physical world independently while gaining remarkably open access to the online world. He calls for more independent play and responsibility in real life, alongside firmer boundaries for smartphones and social media.

The link to adulthood is the opportunity to practise. A child who helps plan a trip, settles an argument in a game, makes a manageable mistake and tries again is learning that discomfort is survivable and that their actions affect other people. Protect a child from every such encounter and you may protect them from some of the very experiences that would help them feel capable. The point is to offer room appropriate to the child and the situation, not to make danger a teaching method.

Then a phone can offer a remarkably efficient alternative to the uncomfortable parts of that learning. It lets us escape a difficult conversation, compare ourselves with a carefully edited life, or reach for a quick reward instead of staying with the frustration of a difficult task. Adults make those choices too. When we do, we show children how to handle discomfort long before we tell them what they should do with their own devices.

Haidt’s account is influential, but the size and causes of digital technology’s effects remain debated. A screen does not turn somebody into an adult-child. Nor does one protective parent produce an incapable adult. The interaction matters: fewer independent experiences offline, more opportunities to retreat online, and less time in places where people of different ages practise obligation together.

There is at least some evidence that the social setting has changed. In the United States, the share of adults saying that most people can be trusted fell from 46 per cent in 1972 to 34 per cent in 2018; a Pew survey in 2023–24 found the same 34 per cent. Pew’s analysis tells us something about American trust, not how many grownups exist in Australia or anywhere else. Still, it is hard to practise the cooperative side of adulthood when we expect other people to let us down.

This brings me back to the opening question with a better sense of what could change my mind. If good evidence showed that people have as many opportunities for responsibility, meaningful connection and collective action as earlier generations, and are using them as well, I would worry much less about a decline in grownup behaviour. We may simply notice failures more often. But where those opportunities have narrowed, I think it is reasonable to expect more people to struggle with an adulthood they have had fewer chances to rehearse.

Making room for grownups

The changes I have traced did not arrive as a single plot to keep people young. Prosperity expanded choices. Social movements removed unjust constraints. Market reforms promised greater initiative. Parents tried to keep children safe. Smartphones made remarkable things possible. Each development had benefits. Their cumulative effect could nonetheless leave us with a peculiar bargain: be entirely yourself, manage your own risks, and do it with fewer shared places in which to learn how.

We can alter that bargain without asking for a return to the Depression, the old exclusions, or life before the internet. Give children responsibilities that grow with their abilities. Let them make recoverable mistakes and help them work out what happened. Give adults enough time and support to keep commitments instead of praising resilience while taking away its foundations. Keep rules fair, explain their purpose, and apply them to powerful people as well as everyone else. Create places where people can help one another without first buying something.

There is a personal part to this work as well. The next time someone behaves like an adult-child, I can ask whether I am seeing a settled pattern or a person under strain. The next time I want an exception for myself, I can ask who would carry its cost. Both questions require the self-regulation I claim to value. Neither requires me to excuse harmful behaviour.

Perhaps the better question is not, “What happened to all of the grownups?” but, “What are we doing that helps people grow up, and what are we doing that gets in the way?” I still think we need more grownup behaviour. We can create more of it when autonomy comes with competence, belonging and a fair share of responsibility. A society cannot simply demand grownups. It has to make room for people to become them.

Thank you for reading to the end. If you got value from this, please share it with your network and sign up below for updates. It really helps, and it makes me smile.