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We examine whether hardship while growing up shapes subjective age identity, as well as three types of experiences through which it may occur. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that hardship in several domains during childhood and adolescence is associated with feeling relatively older and self-identifying as an adult in the late teens and twenties. Specifically, young people who as adolescents felt unsafe in their schools or neighborhoods, witnessed or were victims of violence, had fewer economic resources in the household, and lived in certain family structures, reported older subjective ages (by one or both measures). We find no evidence that hardship's association with subjective age is mediated by work responsibilities in adolescence or by anticipating a very curtailed life span, but entering adult roles earlier mediates or partially mediates many of these relationships.
Sociologists recognize age as one of the most fundamental categories organizing social life (Riley, Foner, and Waring 1988; Settersten and Mayer 1997). However subjective age is equally or more important than chronological age in many processes (e.g., Bowling et. al 2005; Montepare and Lachman 1989; Neugarten and Hagestad 1976). Subjective age captures self-percep- tions of one's age, often expressed in terms of relative age, such as how old one feels com- pared to others of the same chronological age, or the age group with which one identifies (Settersten and Mayer 1997). Social science has recently witnessed a growing interest in the subjective side of aging during the early life course, including pseudomaturity in adolescence (e.g., Galambos et al. 1999; Greenberger and Steinberg 1986) and young people's understanding of what it means to grow up and be an adult (e.g., Arnett 2000; Shanahan et al. 2005; Macmillan 2007).
In addition to interest in the cultural meaning attached to maturity and adult status, some of this newer research points to important variation in the pace of growing up. The idea that some children or adolescents grow up more quickly than others is not entirely new, however. The literatures on divorce and economic disadvantage both reveal themes of accelerated young lives. For example, Weiss (1979) suggested in the 1970s that divorce makes children "grow up a little faster," and consistently, recent research indicates that young people...