The picnic is being held in a run-down duplex on a side street near the university. A group of college students, reluctant to leave the cocoon of college life even for the summer, have rented the space and landed jobs that will see them through to September. Decrepit couches and chairs, ancient appliances, threadbare rugs, and ever present posters that are so typical of college life are the main furnishings. Food for the picnic, assorted empty bottles, and the detritus of several days of hasty meals and impromptu parties fill the kitchen. The only unusual thing about the gathering is the composition of the guest list.

We fall into two distinct generations, 20- and 50-somethings. The younger segment shares the commonality of being students at the same university, with mutual professors, hangouts, and hang-ups—a type of communal memory. The older group consists of ambassadors and retired gardeners, homemakers and medical professionals, teachers and writers. The only thing the latter group has in common is that we are the parents of this enterprising group of young people.

What is even more surprising than the guest list is that the party has been organized and engineered by the younger generation. Lingering over the fruit salad in the kitchen, I attempt to look objectively at the group in the adjacent room. When did young people start wanting their parents to meet one another and become friends? I know this is not an anomaly, a particular aberration of this small group, this college, or even college students as a whole.

We had been invited to a similar party by a surrogate "son" I had tutored and prodded through senior English at the local high school, and the less scholastic group shared a similar warm familiarity with one another's parents. Members of my generation would not have invited their parents to such a party. I suspect I am standing on a threshold, not just to a college residence, but to a very significant generational shift.

Generation What?!?

They have been called Generation X, and the very name expresses much of our ambivalence about them: "X," the unknown quantity, the problem that must be solved if the equation is to make sense. Their extended presence in our homes has led sociologists to define this period as a prolongation of adolescence, describing a stage we once connected with teenagers as now lasting from age 14 to 30. But those of us who parent these young people know they are not adolescents. What adolescents invite their parents to a party with their friends?

I suspect we are witnessing the birth of an entirely new stage of emotional, social, and psychological development. Just as mandatory education and child labor laws gave birth to adolescence at the beginning of this century, today's economic climate—with its need for an increasingly well-educated work force extending the years of education—has created a distinct new stage that oscillates between adolescence and full adulthood.

As parents we have been caught by surprise; Spock never prepared us for this! Our contemporaries without children berate us for what they perceive as "softness"; our own parents question our sanity and encourage us to "push them out of the nest." We know they are not quite ready; but when does the safety net allow them to fly and when does it become a snare? Have we failed this generation in some essential way that has prolonged its childhood?

The wide range of studies, books, and even jokes on the subject leaves little doubt that part of our insecurity and ambivalence in our role stems from this generation's marked tendency to stay home longer and return frequently. Sociologists offer complex reasons for this trend: materialism, lack of a sense of personal identity, the complexity of society, the economic stresses in a world where the chasm between rich and poor grows daily. Standing in the doorway of the kitchen, warmed by this particular group's contentment, I wonder whimsically if they stay home longer simply because they like their parents better than we liked ours when we were their ages.

A Sense of Disconnectedness Lies at the Core

At the turn of the century, Emile Durkheim described us as a nation of people who had lost our "sense of place." The observation is even more true today. We no longer know where we come from. There was a time when we identified ourselves by the hometown of our families. There are places in Nova Scotia where people still ask "Are you the MacDonalds from Halifax or the MacDonalds from Magaree?" but such connections with the land are becoming rare.

Today the job we do, the car we drive, and the house we own tell society more about who we are than the town we came from. A generation of nomads, we have followed the job, the industry, or maybe the sun, and pulled up stakes more frequently than any generation in history.

Durkheim suggested that our identity had come to rest on the work we did and on the material goods that our particular job allowed us to possess. For many of our children, their only sense of belonging has come from what they have been able to pack up and take with them. If their very identity has come to depend on these material goods, is it any wonder that they are unwilling to leave home without them?

We grew up with a strong sense of rootedness and were taught that we could do anything, and we went ahead and did it—many of us on our own. Young people today are given far more help to succeed in what they want to do, but they frequently lack the rootedness we took for granted. The reason they remain in our homes may have less to do with all they have been given and more to do with what they are still trying to find.

On this lovely campus where the new dorms are equipped with furniture, cable and internet connections, and air conditioning, the preferred housing—the rooms snatched up first in the housing lottery—are the rickety old homes like this one that line the streets adjacent to the campus. Looking at the peeling plaster, the loose floorboards, the ancient kitchen, I would be hard put to call this a materialistic choice. These young people want a "home."

Growing Up is Difficult for Parents and Children

With our children remaining under our roofs into their 20s, the task of parenting no longer makes the abrupt transition that an empty nest once created. As jarring as "empty nest syndrome" might have been, it clearly marked the end of adolescence and the dawn of a new relationship with our off spring.

Today there is a lingering, painful transformation from parent as principal caregiver to parent as friend. Our young adults discuss things with us that we would never have told our parents, yet somehow we are sure our parents would have had better answers. They continue to want our input concerning their jobs, their relationships, their studies, but we are no longer able to control and "fix" things the way we could when they were in high school.

What is even more frightening is the realization that our words, while they have far less power than they did then, actually have far more influence. But how much help is too much? When do we allow them to make a mistake and fall flat, and when do we intervene because the fall will be too destructive? The difficulty of parenting an adolescent—a child who is still a child but who wants to be an adult—pales when compared to the difficulty of parenting a child who is no longer a child but who is not yet established as an adult.

While society as a whole seems intent on creating the same kinds of horror myths for this stage as those that have surrounded adolescence, the parents I meet across the country have a far more positive view. Many admit that they actually enjoy having their young adults at home and the new relationship and wider range of interests their presence has created. The usual problems of rent, responsibilities, and transportation must be worked out, but these issues are treated respectfully—between adults rather than between adult and child—and families are proving themselves surprisingly good at the adjustment.

Although Deeply Spiritual, They're Abandoning The Church

The one heartbreaking problem that faces so many of our families is that while our children are remaining home longer, they are leaving the church in droves. Many of us who are not at all concerned about how we can get them to leave home look at the empty pews and wonder, How do we bring them back?

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Religion, with its rituals and doctrines, is supposed to be a bridge to the spiritual, not an end in itself. The majority of young people today are deeply spiritual; they have simply given up on the bridge. They jumped into the river and swam; they built rafts and floats or anything that would take them to the other side.

Popular culture is filled with signs of their deep spirituality. X-Files, a popular television show among the 20s-to-30s crowd, examines issues from stigmata to glossolalia (praying in tongues), while Lilith Fair, a traveling concert series that celebrates women and features generational favorites such as Sarah McLachlan, attracts thousands of deeply sensitive, spiritual adults.

Back in 1970 when the Gallup poll asked my generation what we wanted most for our children, we replied that we wanted them to be happy. When Generation Xers were asked this same question in 1996, they said they wanted their children to be moral.

Many Are Likely Rejecting The Method, Not The Message

This generation has not lost faith in God, even if they do not always seek out the church's wisdom to help them find God in their lives. The rapidly growing phenomenon of spiritual direction among them witnesses to their own search for spiritual meaning. If that search often precludes the communal sense of church and the need to bring all people into a deepened sense of the spiritual, it may have more to do with the way in which we have defined the sacred than it has with any lack of desire on their part to "renew the face of the earth."

These young men and women comprise a hungry, searching generation; they are ready to challenge our complacency and call us on anything they perceive as an injustice. They are open to and interested in tradition, as long as tradition remains life-giving, as long as it creates the sense of home for which they long. They are desperate for us to listen to them. The problem may not be how to bring them back. The problem may well be how we can all move forward by combining Generation X's intense search for spiritual meaning with the rich tradition handed down to us from the first believers of God's Word.

The party is winding down. During the afternoon the conversation has meandered through the stock market, the Russian crisis, managed care, and faith healing. As it takes a more spiritual turn, I watch the younger generation commandeer the discussion. They talk of the presence of the spiritual in their lives with a level of comfort that I find breathtaking, a level that some of the other adults obviously find disconcerting.

If the future of the church rests on a sense of the holy, a love for tradition, an openness to God and to others, and a ferocious sense of justice, I suspect the future is in good hands.

Kathleen Chesto is the mother of three young adults. She has been involved in religious and family education for more than 25 years. This article first appeared in the February, 1999 issue of Liguorian magazine.