Age 13 or 14 used to be a common age for performing "coming of age" (ie entrance to official adulthood) ceremonies. And girls were often married off at age 14 to 16, sometimes to much older men. Americans today generally find that practice appalling as well. The article does mention this earlier change, in somewhat different terms:

Pre-adulthood can be compared to adolescence, an idea invented in the mid-20th century as American teenagers were herded away from the fields and the workplace and into that new institution, the high school. For a long time, the poor and recent immigrants were not part of adolescent life; they went straight to work, since their families couldn't afford the lost labor and income. But the country had grown rich enough to carve out space and time to create a more highly educated citizenry and work force. Teenagers quickly became a marketing and cultural phenomenon. They also earned their own psychological profile. One of the most influential of the psychologists of adolescence was Erik Erikson, who described the stage as a "moratorium," a limbo between childhood and adulthood characterized by role confusion, emotional turmoil and identity conflict.

I have two sons, ages 21 and 23. They spend their days playing video games, getting the groceries and doing what household chores need to get done while I go off to a paid job. All three of us have plans to eventually make money online. All three of us remain frustrated (so far) with such goals. The primary reason for our on-going failure in that regard: I and my oldest son have a serious medical condition and most of our efforts go towards getting all there of us healthy after a lifetime of illness and relatively late diagnoses. So my family is part of this "phenomenon", and we are vastly better off for it than if they got jobs, got married, and all that other "adult" stuff. I think they are behaving far more responsibly and are far more independent-minded (in a healthy way) than most so-called adults of any age.

Given that our medical condition is one of the most expensive, chronic, incurable medical conditions you can have and that most of the medical expenses people like us typically incur are covered by insurance, state aid, federal aid, charities and write-offs (when people just can't pay and the hospital takes a loss), I think getting ourselves well is also the socially responsible thing to do, not mere self-indulgence. I remain frustrated that it gets so little attention (of the good sort -- I've gotten plenty of negative attention in online forums) and the diet and lifestyle approach to wellness is not more popular. I estimate there is about a billion dollars a year spent on the 30,000 or so people with CF in the US alone -- again, mostly being paid by other people in some fashion or another (ie your taxes help pay for this) -- and there is a recession on. It boggles my mind that no one seems to want to support this, promote this, etc.

Anyway, if (and that's a very big if) I ever get anywhere in terms of helping others with my condition get well, it will be due in very large part to my "lazy, good-for-nothing, unemployed bums of eternally adolescent sons who refuse to get real jobs". Even if I can't help anyone else, I cannot get well without the support of my unemployed sons. No, I don't want them getting jobs, thank you.