Adulthood is marked in American society as in most cultures worldwide, by both rituals and responsibilities. Differences in individual and collective experience and values, however, make these passages of teenage years foci of anxiety as well as badges of maturity.

Judaism and many Christian traditions celebrate rituals around adult participation in the community (Bar/Bat Mitzvah confirmation, baptism in some evangelical traditions).

American Catholies, nonetheless, have debated the meaning and timing of confirmation as a socially relevant life sacrament.

Other secular landmarks are reached—and responded to—in different ways throughout the teenage years. Obtaining a driver’s license at sixteen (with some states permitting a learner’s permit a year earlier) has become a major point of transition in an automobile culture. Freedom, responsibility and danger intertwine here in both mass culture and parental nightmares. Various commencements/graduations (especially high school), voting (at eighteen) and legal access to alcohol (at twenty-one) also indicate increasing responsibility as well as risk. These fixed ages also lead to attempts to anticipate or subvert the law, especially with regard to alcohol and tobacco.

Passages may be gendered in both religious and secular observations. Women, for example, are often still classified as adults in terms of sexuality and marriageability. In a small segment of immigrant families, female circumcision occurs as the girl reaches puberty although avoidance of this tradition has also been used to claim refugee status in the US. The quinceanos, an often lavish celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday has become widespread in Cuban American and other Latino groups. This represents an adaptation of debutante parties held by the Cuban elite, augmented by the newfound affluence of many exiles: one father rented the Orange Bowl, Miami’s football stadium, for a party. Coming-out parties and debutante balls are generally considered upper class (and sometimes dated) formalities, but they have also served to reinforce class endogamy.

Meanwhile, at eighteen, men have been expected to register for the selective service. In the Vietnam era, this act became a boiling point of protest, as well as a commitment with potentially devastating consequences; while the draft was ended in the 1970s, registration remains an obligation. The US, with its longstanding tradition of a volunteer army, is unusual in the absence of compulsory military service as a male rite of passage—although it may be evoked in debates like the intergenerational conflict between Bob Dole, wounded in the Second World War, and Bill Clinton, who avoided service in Vietnam.

One of the crucial elements of coming of age, however, has even less ceremony: leaving home. American youths have often sought independence in living, whether moving away to college, taking an apartment with work-mates, joining a commune or defining a separate space in the home (basement or garage apartment). This can also be linked to entry into the job market and is hence dependent on cycles of employment opportunity. Since the 1980s, media have also focused on children who stay—or return— to the family home in their twenties or thirties as social dilemmas.