THERE'S an innate tedium attached to being an adult that no one takes the time to prepare you for.

Hoovering, tax returns, sorting the recycling, trying to navigate relationships with tricky neighbours. The grocery shopping. Switching broadband suppliers.

But why would anyone take the time to prepare you for the existential elements of adulthood when no one prepares you for the practicalities of it?

Such are young people lacking in the necessary skills to get by that classes have been set up to teach the basics of "adulting".

Don't us English speakers love to turn a noun into a verb. You know what an adult is, one assumes, and adulting is "to behave in an adult manner".

While previous generations have just... grown up and begun automatically behaving in an adult manner, the current generations of young people need to make a performance of it and part of that performance is giving normal, every day behaviour a cutesy moniker.

Staying in on a Friday night to test out a new kitchen appliance is an entirely reasonable way for an adult person to conduct themselves. But the Peter Pans among us don't want to accept that they are of an age whereby a matching kettle and toaster might bring joy.

In what is the ultimate oxymoron, if one infantilises the actions of maturity, one can pretend one's youth is not fading.

Those people, there, with their mortgages and monthly car payments on their BMWs. Those are adults. The rest of us are keeping ageing at bay using the distance created by a nickname.

We're not really grown up, we're just doing the occasional grown up thing, ironically.

I wonder about young people who really enjoy doing adult things. Those who can't wait to leave the insecurity and uncertainty of youth behind and knuckle down to a long term relationship, a settled home and perhaps some children.

Do they feel embarrassed at their ability to plan ahead, grocery shop and turn up on time? Do they feel they need to create a veneer of fake self-congratulation to get away with it? Poor kids, if so.

Part of the problem, though, is that these things - a partner, a home, a family - come far later and at greater financial cost than they did to the adults in generations before us.

Now, you have 36-year-olds who still haven't hit the milestones their grandparents had achieved by the age of 21. How do you act your age when there's no blueprint any longer for how a person of your age should act?

In among all this confusion has come support in the form of classes. The UK has its own adulting 101 classes but in the headlines this week is a course at an American university.

Adulting has become one of the most oversubscribed courses at the University of California, Berkeley. The organisers had to turn around 70 people away from the initial 30-person class last year and this year they have accepted fewer than half of the 200 applications they received.

During the 12-week course young people learn budgeting, time management, nutrition, about mental health, applying for jobs, dealing with failure and how to set goals. "Someone said they want to understand when fruit was ripe," said one of the young women who organised the classes, in a throwaway line that would break your heart.

What an image, a young adult, out in the world for the first time, timidly testing peaches in the supermarket and being washed with waves of insecurity. Why haven't they Googled it?

Teenagers face a competition to be the most academic and this means your average striving-for-five-Highers school pupil isn't signing up for practical courses such as home economics.

Helicopter parenting means everything is done for young people - their shopping, their washing, their bills paid. And Millennial and Generation Z young people are famously boomeranging back to live at home, extending their adolescence yet further.

Parents must take their share of the blame for failing to teach common sense skills that were previously taken for granted. How many of us learned to knit and sew as our mothers and grandmothers routinely knitted and sewed? Not many, not unless learned ironically in our 20s as a fashionable hobby.

I had a university friend who was studying to be a veterinary surgeon, so a bright young women, but one so utterly impractical in the home that she tried to roast a whole chicken by putting it under the grill. When the grill went on fire, did she switch the oven off and throw a wet towel over the poorly used chook? She did not. Enter stage left two fire engines, the crews of which had to trek up four flights of stairs to deal with the only slightly smouldering bird.

We need a class teaching that, in a social media age where daily life is filtered and curated, normal behaviour is not a performance.

And let's start by dropping the cutesy names. Using the word "adulting" is the least mature thing you can do.