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of the identity explorations of the emerging adult years are simply for fun, a kind of play, C Ch-08.indd 333 7/8/2008 12:34:31 PM h - 8 . i n d d 3 3 3 7 / 8 / 2 8 1 2 : 3 4 : 3 1 P M 334 Part III " Parents and Children part of gaining a broad range of life experiences before settling down and taking on the responsibilities of adult life. Emerging adults realize they are free in ways they will not be during their thirties and beyond. For people who wish to have a variety of romantic and sexual experiences, emerging adulthood is the time for it, when parental surveillance has diminished and there is as yet little normative pressure to enter marriage. Similarly, emerging adulthood is the time for trying out unusual educational and work possibili- ties. Programs such as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps find most of their volunteers among emerging adults,20 because emerging adults have both the freedom to pull up stakes quickly in order to go somewhere new and the inclination to do something unusual. Other emerging adults travel on their own to a different part of the country or the world to work or study for a while. This, too, can be part of their identity explorations, part of expanding the range of their personal experiences prior to making the more enduring choices of adulthood. . . . The Age of Instability The explorations of emerging adults and their shifting choices in love and work make emerging adulthood an exceptionally full and intense period of life but also an exception- ally unstable one. Emerging adults know they are supposed to have a Plan with a capi- tal P, that is, some kind of idea about the route they will be taking from adolescence to adulthood,21 and most of them come up with one. However, for almost all of them, their Plan is subject to numerous revisions during the emerging adult years. These revisions are a natural consequence of their explorations. They enter college and choose a major, then discover the major is not as interesting as it seemed time to revise the Plan. Or they enter college and find themselves unable to focus on their studies, and their grades sink accordingly time to revise the Plan. Or they go to work after college but discover after a year or two that they need more education if they ever expect to make decent money time to revise the Plan. Or they move in with a boyfriend or girlfriend and start to think of the Plan as founded on their future together, only to discover that they have no future together time to revise the Plan. With each revision in the Plan, they learn something about themselves and hope- fully take a step toward clarifying the kind of future they want. But even if they succeed in doing so, that does not mean the instability of emerging adulthood is easy. Sometimes emerging adults look back wistfully on their high school years. Most of them remember those years as filled with anguish in many ways, but in retrospect at least they knew what they were going to be doing from one day, one week, one month to the next. In emerging adulthood the anxieties of adolescence diminish, but instability replaces them as a new source of disruption. . . . The best illustration of the instability of emerging adulthood is in how often they move from one residence to another. As Figure 25.2 indicates, rates of moving spike up- ward beginning at age 18, reach their peak in the mid-twenties, then sharply decline.22 This shows that emerging adults rarely know where they will be living from one year to the next. It is easy to imagine the sources of their many moves. Their first move is to leave home, often to go to college but sometimes just to be independent of their parents.23 Other moves soon follow. If they drop out of college either temporarily or permanently, C Ch-08.indd 334 7/8/2008 12:34:31 PM h - 8 . i n d d 3 3 4 7 / 8 / 2 8 1 2 : 3 4 : 3 1 P M Chapter 8 " Childhood and Youth 335 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 10 14 15 19 20 24 25 29 30 34 35 44 45 54 55+ Age FIGURE 25.2 Rates of Moving, by Age they may move again. They often live with roommates during emerging adulthood, some of whom they get along with, some of whom they do not and when they do not, they move again. They may move in with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes cohabitation leads to marriage, sometimes it does not and when is does not, they move again. If they graduate from college they move again, perhaps to start a new job to to enter graduate school. For nearly half of emerging adults, at least one of their moves during the years from age 18 to 25 will be back home to live with their parents.24 . . . All of this moving around makes emerging adulthood an unstable time, but it also reflects the explorations that take place during the emerging adult years. Many of the moves emerging adults make are for the purpose of some new period of exploration, in love, work, or education. Exploration and instability go hand in hand. The Self-Focused Age There is no time of life that is more self-focused than emerging adulthood [ Figure 25.3]. Children and adolescents are self-focused in their own way, yes, but they always have parents and teachers to answer to, and usually siblings as well. Nearly all of them live at home with at least one parent. There are household rules and standards to follow, and if they break them they risk the wrath of other family members. Parents keep track, at least to some extent, of where they are and what they are doing. Although adolescents typically grow more independent than they were as children, they remain part of a family system that requires responses from them on a daily basis. In addition, nearly all of them attend school, where teachers set the standards and monitor their behavior and performance. By age 30, a new web of commitments and obligations is well established, for most people. At that age, 75% of Americans have married and have had at least one child.25 A new household, then, with new rules and standards. A spouse, instead of parents and siblings, with whom they must coordinate activities and negotiate household duties and C Ch-08.indd 335 7/8/2008 12:34:31 PM h - 8 . i n d d 3 3 5 7 / 8 / 2 8 1 2 : 3 4 : 3 1 P M Percent Who Moved in Past Year 336 Part III " Parents and Children FIGURE 25.3 Most Emerging Adults Are Not Quite this Self-Focused! Source: CATHY © 1996 Cathy Guisewite. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved. requirements. A child, to be loved and provided for, who needs time and attention. An employer, in a job and a field they are committed to and want to succeed in, who holds them to standards of progress and achievement. It is only in between, during emerging adulthood, that there are few ties that en- tail daily obligations and commitments to others. Most young Americans leave home at age 18 or 19, and moving out means that daily life is much more self-focused. What to have for dinner? You decide. When to do the laundry? You decide. When (or whether) to come home at night? You decide. [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] |