It's been a media talking point for the last five years or so that adolescence is lasting longer and longer.
Rising rents are forcing people to stay living with their parents longer. Increasingly, an unstable job market is making tertiary education a necessity for the most menial employment. Enrolment in post-graduate education is higher than ever, filled with people putting off the 'real world' for just a couple more years.
People are getting married later and having children later. In the UK, child psychology guidelines have officially extended the end of late-adolescence from age 18 to 25.
Auckland artist Henrietta Harris, 31, takes this extended adolescence as her central subject.
Working predominantly in watercolour or black ballpoint pen, she draws and paints the faces of wistfully beautiful men and women in their early-to-mid 20s; their gazes averted, their psychological unease balanced by the hopefulness of their remaining youth.
Her boys all have impossibly floppy, wavy hair, plump lips and wide eyes. Her girls have long, shiny locks, tucked behind an ear or tied up in a bun. Their eyes are often closed.
She says she doesn't know what she looks for in a subject, she just knows it when she sees it. "I like his expression, because he looks kind of terrified," she says, pointing to a work in progress.
Her subjects tend to be friends, or friends of friends, usually from photographs she takes of them to draw from later. "I've done some life drawing," she says, "but it's just easier to do it from photo. I can take my time."