Stuck Between Kid and Adult
“I just can’t wait to be king,” complains Simba. He is not quite one thing, not quite another. Not everyone is the heir to the throne, but we do all spend time as teenagers, no longer children but not yet adults. Are there advantages to life in the in-between? Would it be better if we transitioned more quickly from childhood to adulthood?
Simba struts across the savannah belting 'I just can't wait to be king,' desperate to skip ahead to grown-up power. He's not quite a cub, not quite a lion. And so are you, as a teenager: no longer a child, not yet an adult — caught in the most universal in-between there is.
Key concepts
- Liminality
- Being on a threshold — no longer what you were, not yet what you'll become; adolescence is the clearest case, too old for the kids' table, too young for the adult one.
- Developmental Moratorium
- Erik Erikson's idea that adolescence is a protected 'time out' for trying on identities before committing — the in-between isn't wasted time but a designed pause.
- Rite Of Passage
- A ritual moving a person from one life-stage to the next — some cultures use one sharp ceremony; modern society stretches it across years of undefined limbo.
- Extended Adolescence
- The modern reality that the in-between keeps lengthening — more school, later independence — raising whether that's a gift of freedom or a trap of delay.
What to know
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01
The in-between has real advantages — a low-stakes window to experiment with identity (Erikson's moratorium) before adult commitments lock in, so the awkward limbo is doing essential developmental work.
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