Today and tomorrow we’ll look at the topic of emotional damage that hasn’t really healed, only inspired avoidance. With so much emphasis these days on emotional healing, it is surprising that so many people are still stuck in old habits and hurts.
239. Understandably, families often experience problems when one of their members is emotionally immature because he or she still bears the scars of earlier experiences. An unhappy childhood or adolescence can breed personal crises that affect one’s marriage. Were everyone mature and normal, crises would be less frequent or less painful. Yet the fact is that only in their forties do some people achieve a maturity that should have come at the end of adolescence. Some love with the selfish, capricious and self-centered love of a child: an insatiable love that screams or cries when it fails to get what it wants. Others love with an adolescent love marked by hostility, bitter criticism and the need to blame others; caught up in their own emotions and fantasies, such persons expect others to fill their emptiness and to satisfy their every desire.
For your reference, remember that Amoris Laetitia is online here.
Catholic Sensibility 
It’s surprising to me that you find it surprising. It’s not like there’s a magic newly discovered formula for emotional healing that has been demonstrated to work well across the board, and effective access is not universal. Even for addiction, the 12-step discipline (for which there is typically better effective access), has not been demonstrated to be a sure bet even if you work it. The American love of self-help (and self-realization in the manner of the human potential movement) doesn’t seem to have done much to assure widespread affective maturation by the end of adolescence.
It might be fruitful to ponder why adolescence for many Americans extends long past the late teens and now into the thirties.
As for your last pondering, I’d say it extends because it can. I’m sure a sociologist can cite trends with more accuracy, but I’d say: because of the economy for many college grads, the celebration of youth in American culture, postponement of career (because of college and/or being shy about making commitments), parenting methods of boomers. For starters.