A friend of mine recently relayed the story of how her daughter asked why she couldn’t get her ears pierced like her older sister. “Well, she’s more responsible,” was the gist of my friend’s reply to her daughter, “and when you learn to be more responsible, you can get yours pierced too.”

Lo and behold, that same little girl has suddenly grown very responsible, striving to behave, do her chores, and work toward the prize dangling in front of her at some future date.

Many of us would likely chuckle and dismiss this little incident as an amusing story. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it represents an important concept that our society increasingly overlooks: rite of passage.

Several years ago, the idea of “adulting” and the decided lack of it entered common discourse in

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