Why so many 20-year-olds are failing to grow up

After lunch at a friend’s house at the weekend, I told her she must be proud of her daughter, who not only has a rather brilliant academic brain but is also very beautiful.



‘Yes, I’m very proud of her,’ sighed my friend. ‘But I still have to remind her to do the dishes, and she still has the cheek to complain if we forget to buy her make-up remover when we do the weekly shop.’



Far from being a teenager, my friend’s daughter is 28. She’s moved back home while she continues her post-graduate studies because she’d rather be in her parents’ comfortable South London semi than the grim bedsit her meagre part-time earnings would afford.



This is not to say that her parents aren’t happy to have her back — they adore her and want to do their best for her. But, at the same time, they’re starting to worry whether she’ll ever grow up.



Creature comforts: An unprecedented number of young adults are still living at home with their parents

Nor is she in any way unusual. Eight out of ten 18 to 24-year-olds still live at home today, as do a third of 25 to 34-year-olds — so perhaps it’s no wonder that they’ve opted to see themselves as adolescents far past their teenage years. According to new research published this week, most of them no longer regard 21 as a coming of age and don’t even consider themselves adults until they’re 30.



Of course, each generation complains about the next (‘you don’t know you’re born!’). But it’s our right to wonder whether today’s younger generation is over-indulged — just as it was our parents’ right to complain that we had it easy compared with them.



I fear they were right. By 28, my father was married, with a mortgage, a career and a baby. At the same age I had neither husband nor baby, but I did have a career and a pretty ferocious work ethic.



I got my first Saturday job at 13, in a bakery, and thought I had it made when I graduated to working in a jeweller’s.



Pressure: Graduates possess a sense of entitlement, whereas older generations accepted that they would have to work their way up from the bottom

Throughout school, I worked every Saturday and every holiday. My generation was obsessed with work: we wanted to earn money, to have good careers, to make something of our lives. And we were prepared to start at the bottom to do so.



Unlike my friend’s daughter, I rented a series of freezing flats in unsalubrious areas while I saved up for a deposit to buy a home.

Our children, by contrast, have a sense of entitlement coupled with a paralysing fear of failure. It starts with the pressure we put them under to succeed academically: in consequence, many of them work hard at school and strive to get into good universities.



But having achieved the academic success that was demanded of them, they are bemused not to be offered the world on a plate. While their fathers had no choice but to find the best job they could and get on with it, too many young people today decide instead to continue studying, drift into travelling, are reluctant to make an emotional commitment to the opposite sex and often take the attitude that they work to live, not the other way around.



Focus: Unlike in my generation, women are finding themselves desperately in search of achieving the optimum work/life balance

Indeed many — though certainly not all — of today’s twentysomethings obsess about the importance of achieving the correct work-life balance.



But then we have a Prime Minister who has spoken eloquently on the virtue of getting that balance right. Indeed, he’s a champion chillaxer who presides over a Cabinet largely born to wealth that too often seems reluctant to burn the midnight oil.



Achieving a work-life balance sounds wonderful in theory, but it’s an unrealistic goal for most of us.



Panic: Modern mothers in their early thirties find themselves with newborn babies but never having opened a parenting book

In countries where it’s still considered normal to strive, you won’t hear it much discussed.



Chinese and Indian children are in no doubt about why they’re working so hard at school: in order to enter careers that enable them not only to raise their own families but take care of their parents, too.



Our children, by contrast, have been raised in an infantilising culture that tells them nothing should be unfair or hard or uncomfortable. Of course some of them haven’t grown up. They haven’t been taught how to.

People have expressed surprise that the Queen acted so well in her cameo role with Bond in Friday’s opening ceremony, but I don’t see why. She’s had to act interested all her life. Which makes the genuine reactions of the young royals — William’s shock as the men’s gymnastic team were demoted from silver to bronze, Harry’s enthusiasm and Zara’s pride at winning silver — all the more refreshing. In this Jubilee year, the royals are starting to look almost human.

Repeat offenders

Infidelity: Anthea Turner has thrown out husband Grant Bovey from the marital home after his alleged affair

Heiress Tamara Ecclestone kicked her ex-convict lover into touch after her parents were sent a video showing him ‘in a sordid sex act’ with someone else, and Anthea Turner has thrown out husband Grant Bovey, who left his first wife for her, because of his ‘affair’ with a younger woman.

Good for them. The only surprise is that neither woman saw it coming.

Both men were creeps. Once a creep, always a creep.



If you want a stress-free dinner party, don’t try making a soufflé, advised the Mail yesterday, reporting on a study that shows getting one to rise is the number one kitchen nightmare. To which I’d like to add: don’t try anything at all involving home-made pastry, steer well clear of avocados — they always let you down — and don’t even contemplate creme brulee. In fact, come to think of it, if you really want a stress-free dinner party — order a take-away.

I thought the Olympics opening ceremony was magnificent. There have been calls for Danny Boyle to be knighted, and he certainly put on a brilliant show.

But the real praise has to go to Sebastian Coe, for protecting him from all the busybody ministers and meddlers. The true Olympic feat was allowing a great artist the freedom to get on with it.

Sex trumps sense

Plump British physics professor Paul Frampton is languishing in an Argentine prison accused of drug smuggling after being duped by online fraudsters, who lured him into a honeytrap with photo-graphs of a glamorous Czech bikini model 36 years his junior.

How could he have been so foolish as to believe this raven-haired sex bomb was interested in him? Because in emails purporting to be from her, ‘she said I was a distinguished professor and she needed an older man’.

His former wife says that despite his brilliant brain, he has no common sense.

Actually, I think a terrifyingly high number of men would have fallen for the same trick.

When it comes to men and sex, judgment and common sense fly out of the window.

Pride: Sir Roger Bannister may be one of the most famous athletes of all time, but says family and friends have always made him most proud

Sir Roger Bannister, who in 1954 became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes and went on to become a distinguished neurologist, says: ‘The order of things I am proud of is: No 1 marriage, No 2 family and children, No 3 medicine and No 4 sport.’

Perhaps his words will be of some comfort to those who, like Tom Daley, have so far failed to attain Olympic glory.

A gold medal is a great thing — but marriage, family and career are all infinitely precious.

Dignified silence is a concept I aspire to, but can’t perfect. I can’t do small talk, either. The result is I either say nothing when I should chat easily, or babble inanely when it would be better to keep quiet. So good luck to Carole Middleton, who’s apparently been counselled by her friend Jane Henman (mother of Tim) to curb her natural tendency to chat. It’s sound advice, though. As that previous talkative royal incomer Fergie proved, the only thing familiarity breeds is contempt.

Plotting a life of adventure

Author Maeve Binchy, who has died aged 72, believed that while we can’t control the events around us, we can control our reaction to them, and she certainly practised what she preached.

She gave up teaching to become a journalist in Dublin, and when she met a BBC presenter she fancied, she persuaded her paper to transfer her to London so she could plot a campaign to snare him — which she duly did. Her 35-year marriage to Gordon Snell was extremely happy. When they discovered they couldn’t have children, they decided not to be bitter, but to spend time with all their friends’ and families’ children instead.

Inspirational: Author Maeve Binchy, who has died aged 72, lived a life of adventure

Maeve became a best-selling author, but never let success go to her head.

‘I could have been a fat, lame schoolteacher, whinging and whining,’ she once said. ‘I decided to be adventurous instead.’