Growing up healthy: are adolescents the right target group? [editorial]

Social scientists have known for some time that the life course is highly adaptable that the timing of marriage fertility or even mortality changes with economic and social conditions. Yet it still comes as something of a surprise to recognize how rapidly these changes can produce different social timetables for growing up or for that matter growing old. In the past four decades the median age of marriage has increased by more than five years for example. These and other changes have created something of a demographic limbo for large numbers of young adults who linger in their twenties waiting to establish themselves economically. No longer does the end of adolescence signal the beginning of adulthood. Today the twenties have become what the late teens were a half century ago--a time of transition. (excerpt)