But as is customary in the neighborhood, they're enjoying an extended adolescence, postponing what Ms. Cohen called "the dogma of life."

Females, by contrast, do not have such an extended adolescence.

Perhaps even more now than then, graduate education is an extended adolescence during which highly intelligent young people see their world shrink to fit the dimensions of their adviser's laboratory.

While at the same time, he argues that an extended adolescence prevents young adults from maturing much further from that initial jump made as children.

But in a twist on the phenomenon of extended adolescence, some sons and daughters are now sampling the leisurely lifestyles of their aging parents.

No more extended adolescence for me.

Still, the inability to buy makes them feel as if they are living an extended adolescence, especially because they're eager to start a family.

But for middle-class kids in college, they make responsibility an ever-receding ideal, never quite grasped in the pampered ease of an extended adolescence.

Perhaps the phenomenon of extended adolescence is more a reflection of a growing sense of entitlement that we are witnessing throughout our society.

But this is not the place to ponder the far frontiers of extended adolescence.