I read an interesting article today in the New York Times, on what the deal is with us 20-somethings. The article details the difference between today’s twenty-somethings (“emerging adults”) and the same age group in previous decades.
The article debates whether the transitional self-exploration phase that so many of us go through is actually a newly discovered life stage in the the same sense as childhood or old age, or just a cultural phenomenon. Just as adolescents are broken into ‘tweens and teens, the author suggests that young adulthood should consist of emerging adults and young adults rather than a homogeneous label. This suggests that 25 is fundamentally different from 30.
“IT IS A BIG DEAL IN developmental psychology to declare the existence of a new stage of life, and Arnett has devoted the past 10 years to making his case.”
Now you could argue that this is all hootenanny but a change like this hasn’t happened for a while:
“….what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young. Similar changes at the turn of the 21st century have laid the groundwork for another new stage, Arnett says, between the age of 18 and the late 20s. Among the cultural changes he points to that have led to “emerging adulthood” are the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy; fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.”
The article lists the usual statistics; how more students are moving home, having pre-marital sex and cohabiting rather than getting married, changing jobs almost yearly, and generally “finding themselves” rather than going for the traditional education-job-marriage-house-family-retirement path right away.
Clearly something has changed.
As an “emerging adult” who has siblings and friends just leaving the teenage phase, as well as friends just entering the “young adult” phase, I definitely agree with the change of culture in comparison to what I have learned of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
This desire for exploration is something that Ryan and I have both struggled with repeatedly and in several areas of life.
Jobs
Do we fit the traditional route and find a career and stay there 40 years, the modern route of an average of 10 different jobs over a lifetime, or do we change things up and try to build something from scratch that makes us happy even if it isn’t “normal” and is riskier? So far we have opted to change and try to find something that makes us happy, but the decisions have been far from easy and came only after many long walks and discussions. I know that our decisions haven’t always pleased our parents, and that makes them harder still, but after each agonizing decision we’ve come away happier and more convinced that the traditional “deferred life” plan is not for us. We want to build freedom before retirement, even in small steps. We want to build our own path. Does this solidify us into the new stage?
House
Although we didn’t move back in with our parents, some of my friends either live with parents or are still taking time to travel and explore the world before settling into a permanent job. We are now tied to one city with both a home and a business. Does our embracing of independence in this regard and our now attachment to one place counter this new stage?
Family
We lived together several years before getting married, and when we did marry at 25 and 26 I felt like it was “young” compared to most people we knew.
Having children becomes the next scary thing with a non-traditional career path; it is something we want to do, just not right away. Even my friends who do have children, almost none of them are married and still continue to hop from job to job and explore life rather than letting children prevent them from experimenting. It’s clear that they share some of the same motivations we do.
So at least in my circle of friends, this phase of life is very clearly real. The question now becomes: Why?
Causes:
“You’re unique” and “you’re special”. “You can be anything you want to be.” Did we actually listen? Only now that we really are exploring and trying to be anything we want to be it is scaring our parents to death.
It could be that most parents were so involved and so “helicopter” that this new group never learned to be independent from them, since they never needed or wanted to. At least among my friends their parents have always paid for or enabled anything they have wanted, and have been very involved in their lives. Many of my friends don’t even have drivers licenses because they never needed or wanted them. I can’t blame the economy since this “phenomenon” has been occurring with my friends and colleagues since I graduated college in 2007, well before the Great Recession.
I really don’t know why a divide occurred, or exactly where we stand inside it, but I do know it is real.
What do you think? Do you see this trend, and more importantly, is it a bad thing?
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