The Changing Transition to Adulthood for Contemporary Delinquent Adolescents

• In Event: Turning Points to Desistance for Today's Youth

Abstract

The transition to adulthood has changed dramatically during the past half-century in the United States. Since the post-WWII era, young adults take more time to achieve traditional markers of social and economic independence. Completing education and achieving career employment usually takes longer, which also delays leaving the parental home for contemporary young adults. Marriage and childbearing are less common, less connected, and often delayed. There are also new features of the contemporary transition to adulthood, such as the rise in cohabitation and increases in higher education. Yet, the ways that relatively disadvantaged youth, particularly delinquent adolescents, transition to adulthood is less well understood. This has important implications for understanding the ways social bonds and informal controls formed during the transition to adulthood influence the desistance process for contemporary young adults. In this paper, I use multichannel sequence analysis on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to describe the timing and sequencing of the transition to adulthood for delinquent adolescents and examine whether these patterns can help understand trajectories of offending. I will also contrast their experience to that of the general population and quantify how the transition to adulthood has changed over time for delinquent adolescents.

Author

• Timothy Kang, University of Toronto