[sdegutis]

I'm pretty sure this "babying" is a relatively new thing. I've read a few books written by and/or about people growing up in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and once you were a teenager, you were treated like an adult by all other adults. Sure, a "young adult", but an adult nonetheless. You matured pretty quickly, because you had to in order to survive. But a college degree wasn't necessary back then to make a living on your own income; you could get a job and support yourself through manual labor, and live pretty comfortably. Today you have to go through at least 4 years of college if you want to do that, so you don't really have to grow up until you're in your mid twenties. Plus it's easy to get a high-interest credit card to buy your adult-starter-kit expenses. The result is that you end up with a lot of 30 year old adults who are just starting to grow up, who've only been working for a few years, and who now have massive debt, because they didn't really have to work hard to earn anything until now, and now they're just starting to learn how to work hard in order to pay off all that debt. Source: just making stuff up off the top of my head, ignore me.