Emerging Adults as a Distinctive Stage of Development
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University Affiliation Emerging Adults as a Distinctive Stage of Development
Emerging adults is a phrase coined to depict the transition age between adolescence and full adulthood. Emerging adults are easily perceived as lazy and partly irresponsible when compared with the baby boomers. Nonetheless, emerging adults are a development stage in life rather than a brief transition period as one may be inclined to believe.
Firstly, emerging adults are characterized by a need to identify themselves (Arnett, Zukauskiené, & Sugimura, 2014). Mainly, these emerging adults seek to identify who they are and what they want to achieve in life. Such exploratory tendencies drive them to reconnoiter work, love, and school-related aspects, which may explain the rationale that older individuals may perceive as laziness. The speed by which the group transitioned from adolescence to adulthood was much faster. In part, lack of schools and college education for most people, particularly the females, hastened the transition. People got married at an average of 21 years as compared to the current 28 years. Once married, a person took full responsibility for raising a family that
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In many cases, these college-going young adults tend to live with their parents much longer than the ones that were born in the 1960s. Since they have to pay for tuition fee and attend school, these emerging adults have little time to work and earn a decent living. In other cases, these emerging adults are forced to live with their romantic partners or friends. Consequently, the emerging adults stay longer prior to autonomy. The older generation may perceive this status as being lazy, but the purported sluggishness should be contextualized to this
Have times of becoming an adult being delayed? As a child you think that you cannot wait to become an adult and as you start to embark your journey into adulthood you realize what you said was the worst idea. In the slate article the author, Broke Donatone , she thinks us millennials have a hard time growing up due to the crazy amount of stress we add onto ourselves. According to a 2012 study by CASA 44% of college students are depressed and because of that suicide is the leading cause of deaths in college student. I think the authors’ argument is that the new generation has more problems to face than ever causing us not to grow up properly.
Young adulthood can also be a threatening time because choices made at this time often have a lifelong impact on the individual. What learning tasks gave me the greatest difficulties? It’s easy for me to understand many issues which are related different periods of one’s life. However, I don’t understand the concept ageism, because it doesn’t show obviously in our society.
In the stories "Barn Burning" and "Greasy Lake" by William Faulkner and Tom Boyle, their protagonists slowly transition from childhood into adulthood. Their character's development is portrayed through long periods of near stagnancy, peaking in a sudden moment of enlightenment or epiphany. Both Faulkner's and Boyle's characters have prospered into an adult. Throughout the stories there is evidence that shows how the protagonists arrived at adulthood. Adulthood could have many different meanings.
The Perpetual Adolescent In the article The Perpetual Adolescent, Joseph Epstein discusses the development in the youth culture in the United States. Epstein takes the reader into a historical analysis of how the youth culture has developed over the years in the nation. The article provides numerous examples to support the ideas and arguments raised. For example, the idea behind college instructors wearing T-shirts and jeans while going about their official school duties, instead of official attire, is to relate better with the students.
But once they complete this stage, they tend to be fully prepared and able to complete the demand of latest technology based jobs. They will have the knowledge to make crucial decisions at a mature level that will be helpful in the long run. A different thing that would help this article would be to trying to get more evidence of culture differences and also trying to get a survey of forgotten young adults. This could help to see the other view of life. The young people who skipped this stage are managing in their lives.
There are various explanations as to why young adults have one of the lowest voter turnout percentages. Young voters feel as though that they don’t have much at stake in America than older people. Older people need to know how their children’s school’s are going to run, health insurance, hospitals, their homes, and, of course, their careers. An alternative explanation is that young voters feel that there is no one worth voting for or that they are not well informed about the campaign.
As I emerged myself into this week’s material, my main takeaway is that I do not think about aging. I know most men in my family live to be in their 70s and women into the 70s to 90s, but I do not think about aging from a personal aspect. I am aware that death will eventually come but with my son about to turn two, it is not something I sit and ponder. Not to mention that I will be reaching the 25 year mark next April, which to me is still very young. This made me recall the comments that Dan Buettner made in his TED lecture and how he compared other cultures to the American culture in terms of aging.
Middle Adulthood During this stage in life, Erikson describes individuals in the generativity vs. stagnation stage (Capp, 2004). Individuals between the ages 40 to 65 have generally married, have a career and have their own families. Erikson refers to generativity as a concern of the next generation by guiding and establishing them.
As the generation grew they would soon need to buy their own cars, houses and groceries. Many getting married as young as
Millennials were raised in a time of huge technological advancements, popular agitations, and fairly stable economic situations. Currently at their young adulthood, the cohort is choosing to go further than any other generation on their higher education and opting for jobs that might not pay as much as others, but are loyal to their moral-ethical beliefs and fights . Opting for such careers, added to the student debt acquired throughout their education, puts Millennials in a situation of modest wealth, which is no different from the situation they grew up in, but forces them to be really careful about their personal expenses and life choices. Although there is no official data on what Millennials` wishes for the future are, it is known that
Theories of late adulthood development are quite diverse in later adulthood than at any other age. They include self-theory, identity theory and stratification theory. The self-theory tries to explain the core self and search to maintain one’s integrity and identity. The older adults tend to integrate and incorporate their various experiences with their vision and mission for their respective community (Berger, 2008). Also, the older people tend to feel that their attitude, personalities and beliefs have remained in a stable state over their lives even as they acknowledge that physical changes have taken place in their bodies.
As adolescences enter adulthood, they enter a long transitional period, often known as “emerging adult”. This transitional period takes place over a range of 18 to 25 years old (Santrock, 2013). At this stage, emerging adults are still in exploration in the various aspect of life such as the career path they are interested in, defining their identities and a style of living they would want to adopt. Thus, adolescences who are in transition will be caught with many intense changes and will experience major life events that are all of great importance.
Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood Human development changes throughout a lifespan and those changes include, physical, cognitive, social, and emotional changes between birth and adulthood. This paper reflects my own personal changes and focuses specifically on the changes concerning both cognitive development and psychosocial development. Cognitive development involves the mental mind and allows for reasoning and the ability to make decisions, based on logic and reason, to take place. Once individuals reach the age to reason, the maturity levels and past experiences shifts to concrete operational thinking.
That’s why the Baby Boomers call us ‘lazy’. We are ambitious but lazy. We are the Peter Pan generation according to the Baby Boomers, because we do not want to grow up. A survey of attitudes for the Co-operative Group found that more than eight out of 10 people aged 18 to 30 say they rely on their parents not only for financial support but also for help with tasks such as cleaning and ironing or even for lifts in the family car.
According to Social Investment Theory, proposed by Roberts,Wood, and Smith in 2005, they found that adults’ responsibilities such as family and work, may contribute to the causes of personality change in middle adulthood (as cited in van Aken, et al., 2006). Furthermore, Erikson (1950) indicated that adults during the period of middle age are facing the developmental stage of reaching out to “generativity”, beneficial the next generation, or “stagnation”, which remain locked in their current situations (Ciccarelli & White, 2012, p.331). Koski and Steinberg (1990) reported that midlife concerns in the domains of marital relationships, work and also child fostering. Because as children of middle-aged adults grow older and gradually become adults themselves, opportunities for parental control decreased (as cited in van Aken, et al., 2006). Besides that, Roberts, Helson, and Klohnen (2002) concluded that adults who perceived more marital tensions (lake of commitment and shared valued) and became parents, husbands or wives increased in social responsibility (a facet of conscientiousness), whereas divorce or death of spouse was associated with neuroticism and lost of a job was also decreased in emotional stability and conscientiousness (as cited in van Aken, et al., 2006).