Alan Reifman's Emerging Adulthood Page

2012-01-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

With the Iowa Caucuses taking place tonight to kick-off the Republican presidential nomination fight, TIME Magazine has an article on how one of the candidates, Ron Paul, seems to be doing well with younger voters. As much (or more) a Libertarian as a Republican, Paul conveys his views with statements such as the following one quoted in the TIME article:

“What you want to do with your life, what your religious beliefs are, what your intellectual pursuits are, what your private habits are — that’s part of freedom.”

This one brief quote is amazingly rich in Emerging Adulthood themes. As Jeffrey Arnett details here, three aspects of EA are identity exploration, possibilities, and self-focus. Religious beliefs, intellectual pursuits, etc., are of course part of identity exploration and development. What one wants to do with one's life suggests (to me at least) the idea of open possibilities -- if one wants to pursue advanced education, travel, work in a certain profession, start a family, etc., one potentially can do so. And ultimately, as Paul implies, all these decisions are up to the individual, similar to Arnett's notion of self-focus.

LATE-NIGHT UPDATE: Paul indeed dominated the Republican voting among younger participants, according to a poll of randomly selected caucus attendees. Paul took an estimated 48% of the 17-29 year-old vote, with the next highest percentage from that age group (23%) going to Rick Santorum. When the poll results were broken out further into 17-24 and 25-29 year-old subgroups, Paul did comparably well in each, garnering 50% and 45% of the vote, respectively. (As an aside, it initially seemed odd to me that 17-year-olds were listed in the results; I looked into the matter and, as I suspected, 17-year-olds can participate as long as they will be 18 by the November general election.)

2012-01-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

The New York Times recently had an article about how young women were increasingly opting to obtain additional education rather than join the labor force. One of the charts accompanying the story showed that among 16-24 year-old females, the percentage in school has exceeded that in the labor force during the last few years.

2011-10-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has been reporting this year on how the nation's capital city is becoming a hub for people in the emerging adulthood age range (here and here). According to the second linked article:

About 190,000 of the city’s 600,000 residents are between the ages of 20 and 34, a 23 percent jump. The 35,000 additional people in that age group fueled the city’s entire population gain between 2000 and 2010.

To see how unique Washington, DC really is, I did a little extra research. The U.S. Census Bureau creates what are known as "population pyramids," in which horizontal bars are stacked from the bottom (young ages) to the top (old ages). The wider a given bar, the bigger the population for that age range. The pyramid for D.C. has a pronounced widening for the ages 20-35 relative to other ages, a pattern not seen nearly as much in states such as California, New York, Texas, or even Washington, home of trendy Seattle.

Given how expensive the DC area is, it seems counterintuitive that it would attract young adults. The main reason cited for the capital's drawing power is the seemingly steady availability of government-related jobs. That, and the "hip" nightlife and other amenities. The idea of a reinforcing cycle of amenities (restaurants, bars, shops, parks) attracting bright young adults, and vice versa, reminds me of Richard Florida's writings on cities and the "creative class."

An area of speculation raised by the Post articles is whether Washington, DC's young adults who, for example, are currently single, or married and childless, will remain in the city after starting families or move to the suburbs surrounding DC (or elsewhere).

2011-09-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

A couple of news articles have come out recently about how emerging adults are dealing with the protracted economic gloom of the the past few years. One article, passed on to me by Tim Oblad, a graduate student in our department at Texas Tech, is entitled "Census Numbers Show Recession Taking Toll on Young Adults" (link). The article notes that:

In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others -- nearly 1 in 5.

Many emerging adults appear, in many ways, to be putting their lives on hold until the economy improves. The article suggests, however, that when job prospects get brighter, individuals who might by then be in their mid-20s "will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions."

The article quotes Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, which studies demographic and societal trends, and Mather makes an important point. The past few years' flagging economy didn't initiate the trends of young people delaying marriage, moving back home with their parents, and so forth, but the recession seems to be "accelerating" these pheonomena.

The other article, brought to the attention of the American Association for Public Opinion Research e-mail discussion group (in which I participate) by Leo Simonetta, is entitled "2010 Data Show Surge in Poor Young Families" (link). The two articles share some of the same sources.

Most notably, the second article reports that, "More than one in three young families with children were living in poverty last year," with "young family" in this context apparently defined as the parents being younger than 30.

For decades, the U.S. economy has been rewarding those with greater education and/or punishing those with less education, depending on one's perspective. What's scary is how quickly this dynamic has exerted itself during the current recession. Again, quoting from the second article, "The number of men in their 20s with only a high school degree who worked full time fell by 22 percent from 2007 to 2010, while those with a college degree dropped by just 1 percent, according to census data."

Pretty gloomy stuff! On a separate but related note, Barbara Ray, a fellow writer on young-adulthood issues, has been working on a project called "Generation R" (for Recession).

2011-07-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

The National Center for Family and Marriage Research has a new report out, entitled "On the Road to Adulthood: Leaving the Parental Home." The report focuses on the 18-24 year-old age group and three mutually exclusive statuses: launched, boomerang (returned home after moving out), and never left. Differences by gender, race/ethnicity, and education are explored.

2011-07-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

The American Youth Policy Forum has online videos available from roundtable sessions at a June conference on the transition to adulthood.

2011-07-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

Via the National Center for Family and Marriage Research, a Pew Research executive-summary report shows that, "Among women ages 19-44... 58% had ever lived with an opposite-sex unmarried partner in 2006-2008, up from 33% among a comparable group in 1987..." The article also probes educational and income correlates of different living arrangements. Regarding some key transitions in adulthood, the report notes that:

...cohabitation plays a different role in the lives of adults with and without college degrees. For the most educated, living as an unmarried couple typically is an economically productive way to combine two incomes and is a step toward marriage and childbearing. For adults without college degrees, cohabitation is more likely to be a parallel household arrangement to marriage -- complete with children -- but at a lower economic level than married adults enjoy.

The report focuses on heterosexual couples, but also notes that approximately 400,000 Americans age 30-44 are involved in same-sex unmarried-couple relationships. Many of these individuals may eventually marry their same-sex partners, as this option becomes available in an increasing number of states.

2011-05-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) relays a Census Bureau report on a "Delayer Boom," that is college-educated women delaying childbirth. Further details from the Census Bureau are available here.

2011-04-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

As documented on this blog, there has been a lot of writing lately on Emerging Adulthood (EA), in the form of books and newspaper/magazine articles. One of the newer arrivals on the scene is the book Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It's Good for Everyone, written by Oregon State University professor Richard Settersten and Chicago-based writer Barbara Ray.

(The name of Ray's company, Hired Pen, may lead some observers to an erroneous conclusion; far from just mechanically writing up what her clients want her to, Barbara is a substantively knowledgeable commentator on the transition to adulthood. In fact, at my invitation, she appeared via Skype as a guest lecturer in my Texas Tech course on Development in Young Adulthood, last fall.)

Naturally, it was with great eagerness that I awaited the release of Not Quite Adults, and now having finished it, I think it will take its place among the leading contemporary books on emerging adulthood. Written accessibly for the general public (including parents, teachers, and student advisors), but with no lapse in scholarly rigor, the book covers many traditional topics of EA. These include higher education, jobs/careers, relationships/marriage, social contexts (parents and friends), and civic participation, areas in which the authors make several interesting contributions. As I now look back at the pages I annotated, there are many sections that will be helpful for my teaching and research.

The book seeks to weave together a few different threads: research findings from the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, with which the two authors are affiliated; interviews with young people going through the transition; and advice for such transitioners and their parents. A persistent lens through which the authors present their information is that of social class and inequality. With much of the EA literature slanted towards the college-educated, the book's considerable attention to working-class and lower-income individuals is a welcome development.

Settersten and Ray tackle difficult issues facing young people in recent years' Great Recession and they're not afraid to propound what some might consider counterintuitive ideas. One of the book's more provocative lines of arguments concerns money, debt, and pursuit of higher education. As I wrote in a different venue:

...financial issues likely play a more complex and challenging role for young people of modest economic means who could qualify academically for college, but are reluctant to apply, for fear of getting themselves deep into debt with college-tuition costs. In their new book Not Quite Adults, Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray suggest that the choice of not going to college, as a money-saving strategy, will likely backfire. On pp. 31-33, Settersten and Ray provide statistics on the amount of student debt commonly faced by college graduates and the increment in earnings college degree-holders are likely to receive, compared to their less-educated counterparts.

Another controversial issue on which the authors offer advice is the role of parents in helping their grown children make the transition to adulthood. Parents who seem to go too far in monitoring and acting on behalf of their children have earned the moniker "helicopter parents." A colleague recently shared another term with me for parents who try to clear away all obstacles in their emerging-adult children's way: "lawnmower parents" (or maybe it should be "bulldozer parents").

Settersten and Ray feel parents do have a constructive role to play, but that it should be confined to providing their children with advice and helping them appraise their skills, goals, and options. When parents actually take actions that the emerging-adult children should take for themselves is where the trouble starts (see pp. 176-181). In the past year, I've begun a research program on helicopter parents, which I think will benefit from Settersten and Ray's writings.

The authors also write extensively on young adults' trends toward delayed marriage. In this area, Settersten and Ray dovetail with the 2010 book Red Families v. Blue Families by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, in evaluating the pros and cons of waiting to marry.

In conclusion, Not Quite Adults contributes valuable perspectives to contemporary discussions of the transition to adulthood, and does so in a lively and scholarly manner.

2011-03-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

Lauren Moore, blogging back in February at The Future of Children website, discusses the need for the U.S. to prepare millions of young people for jobs that require something more than a high school diploma, but not necessarily a college bachelor's degree (there are also, of course, millions of future jobs that will require a bachelor's degree).

Moore alludes in her posting to a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that "recommends identifying career fields of interest early on, and then creating pathways by which students can learn the skills they need to succeed in those occupations, some of which involve a bachelor's degree and some of which do not."

In this way, the posting reminds me of the distinction between American and European systems of transitioning young people from education to occupations. As Jeff Arnett writes in his 2004 book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties, "In most European countries, young people separate into different schools by age 14 or 15, with some entering schools that will prepare them for college and others entering schools that will prepare them for a trade, such as electronics or auto mechanics" (p. 132).

Arnett discusses the pros and cons of the American and European systems. Essentially, these boil down to the European system promoting focus and occupational progress, but at the cost of requiring individuals to choose their educational/occupational life path at a very early age (with it being very difficult to change course down the line). The American system, by not requiring early focus and commitment, allows for exploration (potentially good), but with the possibility of such exploration transforming into floundering.

2011-03-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

Jeff Arnett discusses the fate of emerging adults in the persistently tough U.S. economy.

2011-01-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

The new book Romantic Relationships in Emerging Adulthood (Cambridge University Press) is now available. It is an edited volume, overseen by Frank Fincham and Ming Cui of Florida State University, with each chapter written by different authors.

I contributed one of the opening chapters, providing background information on Emerging Adulthood and its possible links to romantic-relationship development.

Other chapters cover a variety of topics, including relationship initiation, family-of-origin influences, sexuality, cohabitation, and relationship education. There are also chapters on methodological and statistical approaches to studying close relationships, such as the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model.

2010-11-20T14:51:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading Ethan Watters's 2003 book Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? I had known about the book for several years and, in retrospect, I wished I had read it earlier, as I found it extremely relevant to the study of Emerging Adulthood. The book grew out of a 2001 New York Times magazine piece by Watters, and the voluminous e-mails he received in response to the article (and other media appearances) from fellow tribe-practitioners around the world.

Urban Tribes are groups of friends, each member of which is usually single or in a dating relationship (in fact, a major theme Watters explores in the book is whether tribe membership helps or hinders one's prospects of getting married or establishing similar long-term relationships). There is great variation in group size, although 50 seemed like a typical number. Agewise, the twenties through forties would commonly define the range of tribe members. A term Watters uses that describes many tribe participants in a manner akin to Emerging Adulthood is Post-College/Pre-Family.

Emerging Adulthood-relevant passages just jump off the page. Young adults without spouses and children face an "excess of freedom" (p. 9) and "a remarkable amount of personal autonomy to make up our lives as we went along" (p. 27). Many live in a "world of confused roles, time lines, and expectations" (p. 9). Some had a feeling of having "delayed becoming an adult" (p. 21) and that it was "Perhaps... time to move on and become a real adult" (p. 23).

The activities tribes engage in can be quite whimsical, such as re-enacting senior proms or taking "elaborate costumed Halloween trips to Vegas" (p. 37). On the other hand, tribe members also did things that represented deep levels of commitment and caring for each other. As Watters describes:

"My group of friends also came together to tackle group projects such as painting a living room, critiquing someone's rough cut of a documentary, or caring for someone who had fallen ill. We moved each other's furniture, talked each other through breakups, and attended each other's parents' funerals. Those who had money loaned it to those who didn't. Everything we owned, from books to tools to furniture to cars, was shared, or loaned or given away on an ongoing basis..." (p. 37). It is these latter acts that led Watters to hypothesize that much of what goes on in tribes of friends might have the significance of what family members do for each other (see discussion on pp. 38-39).

Another key issue is the longevity of tribes. Although people come and go, the core members of some groups sometimes stay together for 15-20 years or longer. The closest example of an Urban Tribe that I could personally relate to was the collection of friends one of my Texas Tech faculty colleagues established as a single, new assistant professor upon her arrival to Lubbock. She and several of her friends and neighbors -- a ballet instructor, a research associate, and several faculty members -- would, among other activities, gather at her house for periodic parties. At one, people had to wear nametags on which their names were preceded by self-descriptive adjectives starting with the same letter (e.g., I was "Affable, Analytic Alan"). After I finished reading Urban Tribes, I asked my colleague if she considered her group to be such a tribe. She replied that, in addition to the parties, her group hung out at a local coffee house and so, to some extent, could be considered a tribe. However, many of the members moved away from Lubbock after a year or two, so the long-term continuity wasn't there.

One last thing I wanted to mention is that Watters reviews several areas of academic research and how they might relate to the phenomenon of Urban Tribes, such as network theory, social identity, and civic engagement (i.e., "Bowling Alone"). These connections would presumably increase the interest level of the book for social scientists, but absolutely no academic training in sociology or other related fields is required to enjoy the book.

2010-10-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

Barbara Ray and colleagues are seeking young people's stories about transitioning to adulthood during the Great Recession of the past couple of years, for a book/documentary project. This project, studying whom the authors refer to as "Generation R," can be accessed by clicking here.

2010-10-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Starting today, I will be a regular blogger for Psychology Today, writing a column entitled "On the Campus: Emerging Adulthood and Adolescent Life." My first column addresses the question of whether college attendance increases students' drinking compared to if they never set foot on a university campus. I'll still post here, on the Emerging Adulthood blog, pertaining to matters outside of college and academia. But for issues in higher education, I invite you to visit my writings for Psychology Today.

2010-09-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

After the 2008 U.S. presidential election, I wrote about the role of young voters in Barack Obama's win and cited expert opinion at the time on whether the present cohort of young voters would continue to turn out in future elections and whether they would remain as heavily inclined toward the Democratic party as they were in '08.

Leading into this upcoming November's midterm elections for the U.S. House and Senate, state governorships, and other offices, Republicans have been projected to make major gains. It's not so much that Democrat-leaning voters are being won over to Republican ideas; rather, polling seems to suggest an "enthusiasm gap" that may propel a greater share of GOP-leaning citizens into the voting booth than of Democratic supporters. However, the Democrats may be catching up in motivation, to some degree.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier today, with the headline "Battle for Congress tightens between parties," suggests that certain segments of the traditional Democratic coalition are started to get more excited about voting -- but young adults are not among them.

The NBC/WSJ pollsters attribute the tightening to increased enthusiasm for the upcoming midterms by African Americans (who saw a six-point gain in high interest) and Hispanics (who saw an 11-point gain).

But young voters, who helped fuel Obama’s presidential victory in 2008, are now sitting on the sidelines. Just 35 percent of those ages 18-34 are enthusiastic about the election in November, versus 65 percent of seniors who say that.

In an apparent attempt to reinvigorate the youth vote, Obama spoke today at a large rally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and apparently will appear on other campuses in the coming weeks (see here and here).

2010-09-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

Today in my Development in Young Adulthood course at Texas Tech University, we had a guest speaker from Australia via Skype. The speaker, Amanda, completed her undergraduate degree at Texas Tech in 2005 and had been in one of my classes back then. Just a few months ago, she fulfilled a long-term dream by moving to Australia. I thought -- and Amanda agreed -- that her desire to explore the world before settling down exemplified emerging adulthood, so she was a fitting guest to have in class. (She had to be available at 3:00 a.m. her time to fit my class time, for which I and the students are very appreciative.)

Amanda is blogging about her journey, which some readers may find of interest. She mentioned during her appearance in my class that as she approached the end of high school, she probably would have been the front-runner to be voted by the senior class as most likely to marry early and start a family. However, during college, a desire to explore that had been with her since childhood came to the fore and she decided traveling the world was for her in the immediate future. Hence, at that point she entered the realm of emerging adulthood.

I was pleased at the number of students in my class who asked questions and at the variety of questions. The students asked about everything from how it is arriving to a new culture, to work opportunities, to what the dating scene in Melbourne is like! One topic we pursued in some depth is concept of a hostel, a form of lodging for young travelers (and others) that some students in the class may not have been very familiar with.

Amanda's timeframe for the next two years or so is to travel to additional countries throughout the world and then work her way back to the U.S. At that point, she thinks, she will be ready to settle down and start a family. About half of her college friends, she estimates, married and started families early, whereas the other half, like her, are taking more time to move into these roles.

2010-09-05T13:56:00.000-07:00

I was quoted in this Toronto Star article about emerging adulthood that came out over the weekend. In addition to providing a basic introduction to EA for readers, the article probed how the theme of aimlessness and indecisiveness during the transition to adulthood has been a mainstay of classic literature, introduced long before social scientists wrote of EA and related concepts. I virtually never read fiction. However, one genre of literature has long fascinated me, the Beat Generation (or Beatniks). Thus, I was able to comment for the reporter on seeming parallels between EA and Beatnik authors. I would recommend Steven Watson's book, The Birth of the Beat Generation, as an historical account.

2010-08-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazine includes a huge article pertaining to emerging adulthood entitled, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" For those who've already read extensively about young-adult development, the article probably won't offer much that is new, except perhaps for the details of Jeff Arnett's personal life growing up through the emerging-adulthood years. If you're new to the area of emerging adulthood, however, the article should provide a good introduction.

The article spends a good bit of time evaluating whether emerging adulthood qualifies as an official developmental stage of the lifespan. Like Arnett, I'm not so concerned about this. As a leading scholar said at a conference I attended in recent years, regardless of whether emerging adulthood is a stage, it does successfully describe what a large number of young people are going through.

Numerous areas are covered in the piece, from brain development, to public policies to aid young people toward full-fledged adulthood, to a profile of a unique (and expensive) mental-health treatment facility for young adults having difficulties, to a topic my students and I are starting to conduct research on, "helicopter parents."

My fellow transition-to-adulthood blogger Barbara Ray offers a provocative review of the article here. Ray critiques Arnett's conceptualization of emerging adulthood as being too focused on individuals' psychological "interior," too preoccupied with "how young adults perceive themselves as agents (or in this case as nonagents), and how they psychologically grapple with their identity and who they are/want to be," and concerned little, if at all, with social structural factors (e.g., the job market) that can greatly affect the life opportunities of young people.

The technical term for the studying the actor's subjective experience is phenomenology. It is the approach that I (along with Arnett and my Texas Tech colleague Malinda Colwell) used in designing the Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA), a questionnaire to gauge how closely an individual's experiences match with the central themes of emerging adulthood. In creating a phenomenological measure, it was never my intent (and presumably not of my co-authors) to discourage or exclude structural factors from inquiry into young-adult development. We have compared college-attending youth and age-matched non-attenders on our questionnaire, for example, in an attempt to take into account more macro-level aspects of society (as it turned out, the two exhibited largely similar profiles on the IDEA).

2010-08-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, as part of a national network known as News 21, has put together an online series that "examines the issues confronting the generation of young adults as they confront their futures in a diverse America. Issues include identity, lifestyle, career, community, social responsibility, dating/marriage and others." As seen in the following screen capture, the series appears to focus on approximately 20 metropolitan areas, about which the reader can obtain various demographic statistics. Shown below the map are some of the stories the school's writers have put together.

These stories range from the semi-humorous ("30 [Things to Do] Before 30") to more serious topics such as interfaith marriage. The project's focus on urban America (and on Chicago, in particular, given Northwestern's location) obviously doesn't represent the full diversity of the transition to adulthood. However, the variety of topics and of media (e.g., print, video) should appeal to readers interested in emerging adulthood.

2010-06-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

USA Today has an article on how long many young-adult couples stay together before marrying. The article asks rhetorically if the new relationship pattern is "dating for a decade."

In some cases, the protracted pre-marital phase seems to stem from partners' having to live in different cities, for educational or occupational reasons. Only when the two partners are settled in the same location do they finally say their "I do's."

Physical separation isn't the only reason for delayed marriage, however. Among the ideas proffered by experts in the article are couples' desire to make sure their relationships can handle strains over the long haul, individuals' keeping their options open if a more attractive potential partner comes along, and the realization that couples don't have to marry young if they don't plan to have children (or only have a small number of them).

(Thanks to Sothy Eng for bringing the article to my attention.)

2010-06-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

The New York Times ran an article a few days ago entitled "Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer" (link). Those of you familiar with the central ideas of emerging-adulthood research will probably find the article to be pretty rudimentary, as exemplified in the following overview statement:

People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent...

For those new to emerging adulthood, however, the Times piece provides a good introduction.

2010-05-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

National Journal has begun a multi-part series of articles on economic problems facing the Millennial generation. Extensive polling data are presented with some of the articles, including from the "Heartland Monitor" survey sponsored by Allstate and National Journal. The articles define the Millennials as being born from 1981-2002, but the polling focuses on 18-29 year-olds. As noted in one of the articles:

Just one-sixth of the Millennials surveyed say they are earning enough to live comfortably. Nearly 60 percent of them are weighed down by student loans or other debts. A significant number -- whether living on their own or not -- report that they still rely on financial help from their parents. And about one-fourth of older Millennials, those ages 25 to 29, said they are still or once again living with their parents -- often after losing jobs they thought pointed them toward independence...

...Their generation is renowned for placing a high priority on personal expression, making a difference in society, and accumulating fulfilling experiences. Those instincts still resonate through the poll -- in the substantial number of young adults who report volunteering their time, for example, or who express interest in public service careers in education, government, or with nonprofit organizations. But across a wide range of economic choices, the survey finds that the ferocity of the recession has left this generation with a powerful craving for certainty. Millennials would much rather stockpile savings in a bank or pay down debt than invest in the stock market. What's even more striking is that they clearly prefer stability with one employer to the opportunity to frequently change jobs.

Such talk of today's turmoil leading to a quest for stability parallels what Jeff Arnett wrote about developments in the middle of the 20th century, in his 2004 book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from Late Teens through the Twenties (p. 6):

Young people of the 1950s were eager to enter adulthood and “settle down.” Perhaps because they grew up during the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II, achieving the stability of marriage, home, and children seemed like a great accomplishment to them.

Whether the economic crisis of 2008 and beyond will lead Millennials to marry at younger ages than has been characteristic of emerging adults in recent decades remains to be seen. I don't think it's too likely, however, as people often want to achieve some degree of financial stability before marrying.

2010-04-29T19:53:00.000-07:00

The Future of Children is a collaborative program between the Brookings Institution (a Washington, DC "think tank") and Princeton University, focusing on child development. Along with publishing a free online journal, the Future of Children group also puts on conferences. A recent topic addressed by the program is The Transition to Adulthood, the subject of both a journal issue and a conference this past Tuesday hosted by Brookings. On the conference webpage, one can find a transcript of the proceedings, as well as an audiotape.

One of the first articles in the issue, "What's Going on with Young People Today? The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood" (by Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray) provides a thorough, yet relatively concise, overview of the transition to adulthood in American society. As these authors note, "Becoming an adult has traditionally been understood as comprising five core transitions — leaving home, completing school, entering the workforce, getting married, and having children" (p. 20). Historical and statistical perspectives on these transitions are discussed. Other articles in the issue focus on particular domains (e.g. higher education, labor market, civic engagement, and the military), with additional articles devoted to special populations such as immigrants, high-school drop-outs, and other vulnerable groups.

Many of the articles include discussion of government policies that might help members of particular subgroups make successful transitions to adulthood. As someone who teaches courses on both Development in Young Adulthood and Family Law and Public Policy, I applaud scholars associated with The Future of Children for attempting to integrate public policy with young-adult development. With a DC-area organization as prominent as Brookings getting involved, perhaps we will see significant policy developments coming out of Capitol Hill. As I wrote about in 2007, Democrats in the U.S. House have had a "30 Something" working group to address issues affecting young adults; legislative proposals for emerging adults (primarily individuals in their 20s) can now be informed by the journal and conference proceedings organized by The Future of Children.

2010-03-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

One component of the newly enacted health care reform legislation allows children to stay on their parents' health-insurance plans up to age 26. I just found an article entitled "New Healthcare Legislation and Young Adults" that provides a very thorough overview of what the new law may mean for families with emerging-adult children. The following paragraph is rich with information:

One provision of reform that went into effect immediately after passage was the continuation of coverage under a parent's plan for any young adults under 26 who were not offered coverage by an employer. However, this may not be as good as it sounds. It appears that instead of being included in the employee/child rate or the family rate, they will be charged at the rate for an adult individual. This could add considerably to the cost of a parent's plan, especially if they have more than one needy child in that category, and it seems doubtful employers would fund the entire cost. Relatively healthy young people may find private insurance purchased on the open market a better deal or still the best they can afford.

Another article (from before the ultimate resolution of the legislation whereby the U.S. House passed the Senate version) provides further background, including an assessment of how young adults' health-insurance coverage appeared to be affected by earlier bills at the state level. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) is quoted to the effect that the new rule on retaining young-adult children on parents' policies:

"is an addition of several years of protection—peace of mind—while a young person goes about finding a job, starting a career and starting a family."

The backdrop for the new provision, of course, is that the median ages of starting jobs/careers and starting a family have gone up in recent decades.

2010-01-13T16:18:00.000-08:00

James Glave, writing for Parenting magazine, shares his story of what the transition to parenthood did to his social life with the guys. Here's an illustrative excerpt:

[Men] tend to connect by doing something active, such as a hike or a round of golf, typically arranged the night before.

We all know what happens next. When baby makes three, the abrupt lifestyle change spells an end to these spontaneous expeditions. Forget about spending Saturday afternoon with Mike and Dave at the climbing gym -- unless you want to unleash the wrath of your exhausted wife. You need to be physically present, grabbing the burp cloth, emptying that Diaper Genie, and covering for your beloved while she sneaks out for a desperately needed salt glow treatment, whatever that is.

Gone is what Glave calls the "dudescape." After a few years, however, he and some friends came up with a way to reinvent the male-bonding experience.

... we created our own, limited version of the dudescape. Call it the "dadscape."

I have fewer guy friends now than I used to, and we're not yet booking road-trip weekends together. Instead, we'll head out for a brisk hike around the lake. It's all stuff in the neighborhood; we're still within cell-phone "recall" range.

The article didn't mention Glave's age, but his story would seem applicable to many emerging-adult males.

2009-12-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Jeff Arnett e-mailed me about a song, "Second Chance," from the group Shinedown. I must confess that I hadn't heard of either the song or the group. A video of the song is available via the group's website and the lyrics can be seen here.

Jeff writes of the song that, "It's a powerful dramatization of a point I've made in my 2004 book, that for EAs with a troubled family life, leaving home is often a way for them to make great changes for the better in their lives" (see pp. 50-51).

Having now listened to the song, I think it also illustrates the self-focus element of emerging adulthood, the point at which a young person transitions to taking full responsibility for him or herself. Here are some sample lyrics:

Tell my mother,
Tell my father
I've done the best I can
To make them realize
This is my life

and

I'm not afraid of
What I have to say
This is my one and
Only voice

2009-12-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

The December issue of Journal of Marriage and Family includes an article by Karen Fingerman and colleagues entitled "Giving to the Good and the Needy: Parental Support of Grown Children" (abstract, press release from Purdue University). The theme of today's young people receiving greater assistance and for longer periods of time than their counterparts from previous generations is not new. What's interesting about this new article is that the greatest amount of parental aid (emotional as well as material) flowed not just to children having the most trouble making the transition to adulthood, but also to the most successful ones. The authors suggested that parents may assist successful children to bask in the latter's achievements (and their own childrearing) or to sew the seeds for the child to assist the parents in their old age.

2009-11-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times has an article entitled "Economy Is Forcing Young Adults Back Home in Big Numbers, Survey Finds." The article focuses primarily on a new study by the Pew Research Center, including the finding that, "Ten percent of adults younger than 35... moved back in with their parents because of the recession." Here's a link to the original Pew report.

2009-11-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Several articles have recently appeared on the question of what age (or ages) should delineate the onset of adulthood for purposes of rights and responsibilities under the law. The outlets in which these articles have appeared include the New York Times, the American Psychologist, and the policy wonkish Governing magazine.

The emergence of these articles coincides with a currently pending U.S. Supreme Court case on whether it is constitutional to impose a life sentence for a crime other than murder that was committed as a juvenile. Beyond court cases, however, the issue of legal cut-off ages is fascinating and challenging in its own right. According to the Times article:

At the heart of the argument lies a vexing question: When should a person be treated as an adult?

The answer, generally, is 18 — the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions. But there are countless deviations from this benchmark, both around the world (the bar mitzvah, for instance), and within the United States.

For drinking, driving, fighting in the military, compulsory schooling, watching an R-rated movie, consenting to sex, getting married, having an abortion or even being responsible for your own finances, the dawn of adulthood in America is all over the place.

Among the factors complicating this debate is that different cognitive and behavioral abilities -- corresponding to different policy objectives -- may, on average, crystallize at different ages. The aforementioned American Psychologist article by Laurence Steinberg and colleagues contends, for example, that factual, logical abilities solidify earlier than impulse-control mechanisms.

One approach to addressing these challenges is to phase in legal rights gradually or contingent on parental approval. Examples include "graduated" driving privileges and the mimimum ages at which young people can marry.

I invite readers who have opinions on this topic to add comments to this posting!

2009-11-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

The New York Times, in its "Room for Debate" forum, recently featured the topic, "The 40-Something Dependent Child." In the first part, the Times solicited the opinions of scholars and authors as to why many young people are taking longer than in past generations to establish their own financial independence. In the second part, Times readers share their views.

2009-10-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

Business Week magazine's October 19 issue featured a cover story entitled "The Lost Generation." As the article notes:

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts, to college grads, to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18%, from 13% a year ago.

Further, as detailed in the article, negative consequences of these employment problems include depressed lifetime earnings, low worker morale, and stress and mental health problems.

An accompanying article evaluates the merits of Germany's apprenticeship system for youth who pursue early job training as opposed to higher education and professional careers. One young man featured in the article "g[ave] up full-time schooling at age 15" for a training program that involved "alternating two weeks of on-the-job training with one week of classes at a vocational school." In addition to heating, plumbing, and air-conditioning, other tracks "rang[e] from baker to hair stylist and bank clerk to video editor." The article notes many benefits of the apprenticeship system, but also some risks, especially in a global economic downturn.

2009-09-22T21:57:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News has just reprinted a TIME magazine article on young adults' widespread lack of health-insurance coverage and the implications of this situation for the ongoing congressional efforts to enact health care reform.

According to the article, one-third of 19-29 year-olds lack coverage. The reasons are varied: "These young adults are less likely to be offered employer-based coverage, earn less money to buy insurance on their own, are generally healthy and spend little time worrying about the worst-case scenarios that could befall them."

The last reason cited, regarding the mindset of many emerging adults, is probably the most interesting one to human development scholars, many of whom are interested in risk-taking and cognitive processes in adolescents and young adults. This perspective has not escaped the attention of policymakers, either. The article notes that, "A draft of the [Senate] Finance Committee's bill calls for a new category of health insurance specifically designed for what it calls 'young invincibles.'"

So imperative do experts consider health-insurance enrollment of young adults -- "to help spread out risk and keep older Americans' premiums from going even higher" -- that the legislation may ultimately include provisions to fine individuals who don't sign up for insurance packages that are offered. The hope, in the words of a Finance Committee aide quoted in the article, is that young adults will think, "You are still paying $950 for nothing or you pay a little bit more for something."

2009-07-22T17:04:00.000-07:00

Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin's new book, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, focuses on the high rate of couple and family turnover in the U.S. Though the book's focus is on Americans' high rates of marriage, divorce, and re-partnering, Cherlin also addresses how the transition to adulthood in contemporary America may be linked with marital dynamics.

An illustrative statistic Cherlin cites is the percentage of women in different countries who have "three or more live-in partners (married or cohabiting) by age thirty-five" (p. 19). In the U.S., it's 10%, whereas in other English-speaking nations (those in Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), none was higher than 4.5%.

Early on, Cherlin states that, "The journey from adolescence to adulthood, so clear at mid [20th] century, is now a long slog filled with choices... We have gone from a lockstep pattern of getting married young, then having children, and for the most part staying married, to a bewildering set of alternatives..." (pp. 7-8).

Cherlin theorizes that contemporary trends in American marital/coupling behavior derive from two salient motivations in this country -- the desire to marry and the quest for "expressive individualism" (p. 9). The latter, which Cherlin identifies as a twentieth-century phenomenon, involves individuals' concerns with lifelong personal growth, which could propel some people to leave their marriages if they consider them psychologically and emotionally stagnant. The idea of constructing one's life to express and reflect one's personal values, of course, is a central facet of the concept of emerging adulthood.

The book's remaining analysis of young-adulthood transitions largely occurs through the lens of social class. Notes Cherlin, "What we are seeing is the emergence of two different ways of shooting the rapids of the transition to adulthood -- the process of completing one's education, developing a career, having children, and finding a lasting, intimate partnership. Among the college-educated, we see a more orderly, predictable sequence of events, one that has fewer changes of partners" (p. 167).

Among the college-educated, Cherlin states, a typical sequence is followed. These individuals will oftentimes finish school, take jobs, work for several years, get married (often after a period of cohabitation), then have children. In contrast, "[t]he strategy that many young adults in the bottom third of the educational distribution, and some in the middle third, use is to have children earlier, sometimes in a cohabiting relationship, sometimes as a lone parent... The marriages that do form among the less-educated are precarious. Over the past two or three decades, the divorce rate has fallen for women with college educations while remaining steady or rising for women without college degrees" (pp. 167-168).

Questions of cause and effect in family studies are always salient, because relevant processes are often difficult or impossible to manipulate experimentally (e.g., the effect of having children on marital satisfaction). Cherlin's book also delves into causality issues, which I summarize on my correlation-causality blog.

Yet another valuable aspect of the book is its discussion of family policy. This content will be helpful each time I teach Family Law and Public Policy. In short, although I purchased the book myself, I've found The Marriage-Go-Round to be a gift that keeps on giving!

2009-06-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

This article in the University of North Carolina's Daily Tar Heel provides some national statistics on 2009 college graduates' difficulty of lining up jobs, compared to their 2007 and 2008 counterparts. Also, in support of common folk wisdom, a weak job market appears to be associated with greater student interest in graduate school.

“Right now we’re looking at around 39 percent, and typically we’re in the 25 percent range,” [UNC career services official Tim] Stiles said. “People want to park themselves in some graduate programs for the next few years to kind of ride things out.”

Much of the research on emerging adulthood implies that young people often voluntarily pursue post-graduate education in order to compete for "information age" jobs and to give themselves more time to "find themselves." In the present economic situation, the pursuit of additional education appears to be out of necessity in many cases.

2009-05-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

For those interested in emerging adults' entry into the corporate workforce, The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace, a recent book by Wall Street Journal writer Ron Alsop, is for you.

Drawing upon personal interviews -- with personnel/hiring managers, college career advisors, recent college graduates, and their parents -- and data from various surveys, Alsop examines the Millenials' (defined as individuals born between 1980–2001) arrival in the workforce. Whereas some of the findings in the book may apply to broad cross-sections of Millenials, others are probably more reflective of what Richard Florida calls the "Creative Class."

Fairly or unfairly, the Millenial generation has been labeled with a number of unflattering traits, such as having a sense of entitlement and being "high-maintenance." More favorably, the Millenials also seem to be inclined to volunteerism and social causes.

To me, one overarching trait that appeared to capture much about the Millenials is resistance to boundaries.

*They feel they should be able to work from home, rather than in the office, as long as long as they complete their tasks (the term ROWE, for Results-Oriented Work Environment, comes up, as exemplified by electronics/appliance chain Best Buy).

*They feel they should be able to be promoted at any time, based on work performance, and not according to strict timetables.

*They feel they should be able to talk personally with high-ranking officials in the corporation (and even call them by their first names, in some instances).

*They have no problem bringing their parents into work- and school-related matters (not that the parents are reluctant to insert themselves into these situations, either).

Many of these behaviors drive employers crazy, Alsop notes. However, faced with a need to bring in cadres of talented young employees to keep the company functioning and vibrant, businesses are forced to make some accommodation to the Millenials.

One must acknowledge the distinction between developmental changes in the transition to adulthood that presumably are largely invariant from generation to generation, on the one hand, and phenomena that appear to be unique to a particular generation, on the other. The book clearly seems to emphasize the latter. Still, I've already added quotations from The Trophy Kids to update my online lecture notes for the next time I teach Development in Young Adulthood. I'll have to caution my students that much of the material might be described more accurately as Development [of One Generation] in Young Adulthood.

Chapter 1 of The Trophy Kids is available free online at the above-linked webpage for the book.

2009-05-10T18:45:00.001-07:00

Nate Silver of the politics/statistics website Five Thirty Eight has some graphs up, based on recent Gallup surveying. The most interesting graph, to me, is the one that plots current (early 2009) party identification (Democratic lead over Republican) on the y-axis, as a function of respondent's current age, on the x-axis. To bring out the key message, however, the graph adds color shading and name labels to show who was president when the respondent was 18 (e.g., someone who is 42 years old today would have been 18 in 1985, when Reagan was president).

The Democrats have greater party ID than the GOP in all age groups today, but the margin varies quite a bit. Among respondents whose 18th birthday coincided with George W. Bush's presidency, the Democratic party ID edge is huge, upwards of 18%. On the other hand, those who were 18 at some point during the generally successful and popular presidency of Ronald Reagan (until scandal hit in his sixth year in office) are roughly equally distributed in their support for the two parties (which is as good as things get for the GOP today).

These findings suggest that the late teens and early adulthood may be formative times for lifelong political affiliations. The graph in question is the second one down you'll see after clicking here.

2009-03-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

Information is now available online for submitting papers to the 4th biennial (roughly) Emerging Adulthood research conference. The conference will be held October 29-30, 2009, in Atlanta Georgia. Paper proposals are due on May 1st, 2009.

2009-02-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

One part of Jeffrey Arnett's conceptualization of emerging adulthood is that it is a time of life that carries a sense of possibility. Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, suggests that the possibilities open to someone can be greatly enhanced or curtailed by some quite arbitrary factors.

Among other examples, Gladwell discusses the Canadian youth hockey policy of placing players on purportedly uniform-age teams based on how old they are as of January 1. If a player's birthday happens to be January 2, he (or perhaps she) will immediately be older than the rest of the team, especially relative to someone whose birthday is in December. As a result of being older -- and potentially also physically stronger and larger -- than most other players, those players born early in the year will get to play more, develop better skills, get selected for all-star teams that expose them to better coaching and provide more practice opportunity, etc. As Gladwell documents, the apparent upshot of using the arbitrary marker of someone's birth month as an organizing principle for youth hockey is that, across various levels of competitive hockey in Canada, team rosters are comprised disproportionately of players born in January, February, and March.

Likewise, Gladwell suggests that there were optimal historical times (usually in years, not months) and places to grow up if one wanted to be a success at computer software development, corporate takeover law, garment manufacturing and sales, and other endeavors. Tying all of this back to emerging adulthood, Gladwell writes the following:

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with (p. 137).

2009-01-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

Today's Los Angeles Times has an article on how television networks may be moving away from demographic targeting of young adults in their programming, in favor of family-oriented, "big tent" fare that appeals to all ages. In other words, we may see fewer shows inspired by "Friends" and "Seinfeld," and more modeled after "The Cosby Show" and "Everybody Loves Raymond." Though the 18-49 year-old "young adult" demographic that's previously been targeted extends well beyond what we would consider emerging adulthood, many of the points in the article mesh well with the study of EA.

As previously discussed on this blog and elsewhere, characteristics of emerging adulthood include openness to novelty and experimentation. For this reason, television executives, marketers, and advertisers will never lose touch completely with the 18-49 demographic, according to the article:

None of this means, of course, that the 18-to-49 yardstick is about to become as obsolete as rabbit-ear antennas. Young people remain the most important early adopters of new products and cultural trends. Their purchase decisions are vital to marketers in such big categories as consumer technology, movies and cars.

Another oft-cited theory for why young-adult viewers are important, namely that of establishing lifelong brand loyalty, does not appear to have much support in the media/advertising community:

The idea was that "if you bought Crest toothpaste when you were 18 years old, when you turned 50 you would still use Crest toothpaste," [CBS chief Leslie] Moonves said.

Indeed, [media analyst Steve] Sternberg and others said they knew of no reliable studies backing that theory.

One final point that jumped out at me from the article was the discussion of how increasing life-expectancies are changing notions of age-appropriateness:

Also, Moonves adds, "a 50-year-old today is different than a 50-year-old 25 years ago. The life expectancy is longer; the boomers are doing more in their 50s, they're experiencing more. It's a very different generation."

2008-12-28T15:41:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading the book Guyland, by sociologist Michael Kimmel (hat tip to Janis Henderson, my Teaching Assistant, for bringing the book to my attention). The subheading of the book's title signifies the developmental nature of the subject matter: "The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men/Understanding the Critical Years Between 16 and 26."

Kimmel charges Jeff Arnett's and others' writings on emerging adulthood with saying "nary a word about gender" (p. 41), setting the stage for Kimmel to articulate his own theory of the male experience. Guyland does not apply to all young men, however. Quoting from the above-linked website for the book:

Kimmel’s study shows that the guys who live in “Guyland” are mostly white, middle-class, totally confused and cannot commit to their relationships, work or lives. Although they seem baffled by the riddles of manhood and responsibility, they submit to the “Guy Code,” where locker-room behaviors, sexual conquests, bullying, violence and assuming a cocky jock pose can rule over the sacrifice and conformity of marriage and family. Obsessed with never wanting to grow up, this demographic, which is 22 million strong, craves video games, sports and depersonalized sexual relationships.

The heart of the Guy Code seems to be rank-and-file young males' strong desire to win the approval and avoid the scorn of the "cool" guys. For that reason, guys in the crowd will remain silent at what are often cruel and violent acts perpetrated by the leaders of the group (e.g., fraternity hazing, group sexual assaults).

Through this lens of social approval, other stereotypically male behaviors such as sports fanaticism and binge-drinking, can be seen as efforts for guys to impress other guys. According to Kimmel, this lens can also explain at least some guys' relationship (or non-relationship) choices. Regarding sexual "hookups," Kimmel writes:

...it's a bit more complicated than simple pleasure-seeking on the part of guys, because as it turns out pleasure isn't the first item on the hookup agenda... If sex were the goal, a guy would have a much better chance of having more (and better) sex if he had a steady girlfriend. Instead, guys hook up to prove something to other guys (p. 206).

In the latter parts of the book, Kimmel also explores the implications of Guyland for the psychosocial development of young women who come into contact with this male subculture.

In the end, Kimmel expresses the hope that developing young men can avoid the darker impulses of Guyland and become ethical, humane, and responsible men. Throughout the book, Kimmel shares positive examples of men who stood up to others who wanted to commit antisocial acts (or who at least owned up to their actions and expressed remorse after the fact).

Guyland, Kimmel reminds us at the end, is both a life stage and a symbolic place, only the latter of which he feels needs to be trimmed back or abolished: "There are positive reasons for delaying marriage, exploring different career paths, playing the field, traveling, hanging out, exploring oneself and who one wants to be, and become, in this lifetime... ...our task, as a society, is to decouple the stage of life from that social space..." (pp. 287-288).

On the whole, I found the book well-researched and documented; however, there are a few areas I would quibble with. Kimmel claims that, among other behavioral difficulties, "...boys are more prone to depression..." (p. 54). This claim is contrary to research showing that, in the words of Nolen-Hoeksema and Girgus, "There are no gender differences in depression rates in prepubescent children, but, after the age of 15, girls and women are about twice as likely to be depressed as boys and men." For a more recent examination of gender differences in the development of depression, see this abstract from Janet Shibley Hyde and colleagues.

Kimmel's writing is lively, and the ideas are thought-provoking. I would recommend Guyland to anyone interested in emerging adulthood or gender-role development.

2008-11-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

Now that Election 2008 has been completed and analysts have had several days to watch exit-poll and other data roll in, some impressions of the youth vote (18-29) are starting to crystallize. First, some basic data, from the organization CIRCLE...

Noting that, "...youth voter turnout is the percentage of eligible 18-29 year olds who voted," CIRCLE estimates that around 52 or 53 percent of eligible 18-29 year olds voted this year. This figure continues the upward trend from 1996 (37%), 2000 (41%), and 2004 (48%).

[The 48% youth participation rate in 2004 can (roughly) be broken down further, by multiplying the following two figures from here: "In 2004, 81.6% of registered 18-29 year olds voted in the Presidential elections. Only 60% of 18-29 year olds were registered to vote in that election."]

However, again according to CIRCLE:

Young people (ages 18-29) represented 18 percent of the voters in Tuesday’s election, according to the National Exit Polls (NEP) conducted by Edison/Mitofsky. This is one point higher than in 1996, 2000 and 2004, when young voters represented 17 percent of voters in each presidential election, according to the NEP.

What this means is that, concurrent with youth voters' ever-increasing participation in recent elections (relative to their same-age counterparts in previous years), there has also been rising voter participation in older age groups. Thus, 18-29 year olds have not increased their share of the overall electorate much, from 17% in the past to 18% this year.

Purely in terms of turnout, it seems fair to say that youth voters participated somewhere in between the visions of the most optimistic and most skeptical observers.

The biggest story of this year's youth vote, therefore, would appear to be the unusually lopsided distribution of candidate preference: Obama 66%, McCain 32%. The full electoral implications of this margin are developed in this document:

In 2008, 18% of the electorate was comprised of 18-29 year-olds. That figure, when multiplied by the 34 percent differential in Obama voting equals 6.1 points, or a majority of Obama's popular vote margin. Had the Democratic 18-29 year-old vote stayed the same as 2004's margin, Obama would have won by about 1 to 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.

I am based at Texas Tech Univesity in the deeply "red" (Republican) state of Texas. I was amazed, therefore, to see exit-poll data showing that Obama carried the 18-29 vote in the Lone Star State, with 54%. All of the age groups of older Texans went for McCain, most dramatically the 66% of 65-and-older voters who went for the Arizona senator.

As social scientists, we aim not only to document trends, but also to understand why things turned out as they did. As detailed here, "Generation We" writer Eric Greenberg commissioned a major study of the so-called "Millenial" generation (born from 1978-2000).

Among the attitudes and values found to characterize the Millenials, their self-reported openness to innovations and new ideas appears to map onto some of the themes of emerging adulthood, such as trying out new things and learning to think for oneself.

Millennials pride themselves not only on their recognition that the status quo has failed but also on their refusal to be constrained by past conventions. Of all the attributes on which they were asked to compare themselves to earlier generations of Americans, they identified their willingness to "embrace innovation and new ideas" as the variable that most differentiates them from older Americans...

Young persons' "refusal to be constrained by past conventions" was apparent beyond the presidential election. On California's Proposition 8, exit polls revealed 18-29 year olds to be the only age group in which a majority took the pro-same-sex marriage position (61% for "No"). In mirror image, the oldest voters (65 and older) came down 61% in opposition to same-sex marriage (voting "Yes" on the measure).

The source of older voters' conservatism in the 2008 election cannot be determined solely by exit polls from last Tuesday, with longitudinal studies being necessary. Were today's older voters more liberal at earlier points in their lives and then become more conservative with age (known as an aging effect)? Or perhaps was there something about becoming an adult in the years roughly from 1945-1960 that would make today's older voters more conservative (known as a cohort effect)? (See here for an illustration of these effects.)

If the 18-29 year-old voters of today retain their liberal values throughout their adult life spans -- and this is a big if -- then the Democratic Party will be in good shape for a long time. Quoting again from the article about Greenberg's research:

Born between 1978 and 2000, the Millennials currently include 95 million young people up to 30 years of age -- the biggest, most diverse, and best-educated age cohort in the history of the nation. In 2016, they will be 100 million strong and positioned to dominate the American political scene for 30-40 years.

UPDATE: Over at Pollster.com, Kristen Soltis has written an interesting piece entitled "The GOP Faces Long-Term Challenge With Young and Independents." Below, I reproduce two paragraphs that I feel are particularly relevant to the study of emerging adulthood (along with Soltis's bibliographic references):

Scholars have noted that early adulthood plays a key role in the creation of political generations. In 1974, Beck described that young voters are primarily responsible for the birth of electoral realignment.(1) Billingsley and Tucker (1987) follow this analysis with the claim that political generations are often defined by political events occurring during young adulthood. (2) Indeed, the generation of voters in the 18-29 age group for the 2008 election were made up of those whose young adult political life would likely have included the events of September 11th as well as the expansion of political news availability via cable news and the Internet - not to mention the entire Bush Administration. The long term impact on the GOP of this swing will be felt for years to come i[f] young voters are not appealed to with a positive, modern agenda that speaks to their concerns - the environment, energy, the economy, education, and entitlement reform. (Perhaps there's something with the letter "e"?)

...

The Republican Party has two major challenges that jump from these numbers that must be tackled. First, the GOP must win back the youth vote. There's little reason to believe that this year was an aberration - that young voters came out for Obama but will fade away and become apathetic in years to come. However, barring major life events, young voters who leave a pattern of habitual non-voting by voting for the first time will be carried [by] "inertia" to continue voting in future elections. As more and more young voters go to the polls, the norms surrounding voting among that age cohort will change the social costs of voting in a way that provides positive peer reinforcement, contributing to higher turnout. (3) Furthermore, the longer the GOP waits to try to win these voters back, the harder it will be - prior study has already established that as voters age, their partisan identification grows stronger. (4)

...

1) Beck, Paul. (1974). A socialization theory of partisan realignments. In Richard Niemi and associates (eds.), The Politics of Future Citizens. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

2) Billingsley, K., & Tucker, C. (1987). Generations, Status and Party Identification: A Theory of Operant Conditioning. Political Behavior, 9(4), 305-322

3)Plutzer, E. (2002). Becoming a habitual voter: inertia, resources, and growth in young adulthood. American Political Science Review, 96(1), pp 41-56.

4)Claggett, W. (1981). Partisan acquisition versus partisan identity: life-cycle, generation, and period effects, 1952-1976. American Journal of Political Science, 25(2), pp 193-214. and Campbell, A., Converse, P., Miller, W., and Stokes, D. (1960). The American voter. New York; Wiley.

2008-09-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

A new "Rock the Vote" poll of 18-29 year-olds has just been released.

2008-09-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

Among the things we've learned from the back-to-back Democratic and Republican conventions over the past two weeks, plus the related news coverage and blogger comments, is how the two "youngsters" of the campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, 47, and GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, 44, spent at least parts of their emerging-adulthood years.

According to the Wikipedia page on Obama:

A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Community involvement, as well as other types of volunteerism, are the kinds of things an emerging adult might do en route to solidifying one's identity and world views. But it was precisely Obama's community work that Palin ridiculed during her convention speech, in contrasting her own background with his:

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities."

In response, a participant at the left-leaning blog Daily Kos provided a pictorial tribute to community organizers throughout history.

One of the hallmarks of emerging adulthood is, of course, exploration amidst a sea of options. Palin, apparently, did more exploring than most as a college student, transferring between institutions five times.

Obama and Palin, each in their own ways, have made it to the political big leagues, though, and the rest is up to the voters.

2008-08-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

Thursday's (August 21) New York Times had an article entitled "Following the Kids to College." The article reports on what seems to be the latest phenomenon in college students' relationships to their parents -- namely, having out-of-state parents buy a home in the town of their children's college. I was interviewed a few months ago by the Times writer, and only learned today that the article had been published. The writer did a good job, in my view, of talking to a variety of experts and obtaining different perspectives. A brief quote of mine was used, featuring what perhaps could be a new contribution to the lexicon.

2008-08-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, a major policy debate was touched off by a public letter from over 100 college and university presidents, advocating a "rethinking" of the quasi-national 21-year-old drinking age in the U.S. As noted in this article, "Technically, laws governing drinking age are left up to each state. However, all states adopted 21 as the minimum drinking age after Congress mandated in the mid 80's that any state that allowed drinking under 21 would lose ten percent of federal highway money."

Writing under the title, the Amethyst Initiative, the presidents take what could be called a "harm reduction" approach. Such a perspective argues that, as much as one might want people to refrain from a potentially dangerous behavior, people are going to do it anyway. Therefore, such behavior should be legalized to bring it out into the open and prevent the worst of the harms associated with the behavior. As the presidents' letter notes, "A culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge-drinking' — often conducted off-campus — has developed."

Indeed, according to the Harvard School of Public Health's College Alcohol Study surveys from the 1990s and early 2000s, students younger than 21 drink at a similarly high level to their older-than-21 counterparts. More anecdotally, the Alexandra Robbins book Pledged talks about the extensive drinking -- and efforts to conceal that drinking from the university community -- among sorority members.

As an academic researcher of college drinking, I immediately sought to round up as much evidence bearing on the controversy as possible within a narrow time frame, study it, and present it on this blog, in an effort to further the debate.

Opposition is mounting quickly to the presidents' initiative, however. In fact, a story in yesterday's New York Times reports that two of the original participants have withdrawn their signatures (although some additional presidents have added theirs).

The Times article included quotes from opponents of the presidents' letter, including the following:

“Why would you take the one thing that has been tried in the last 30 years that has been shown to be most successful and throw that out the window and say, ‘I have a better idea?’ ” said Alexander C. Wagenaar, an epidemiologist at the College of Medicine at the University of Florida.

Wagenaar's views are stated in more depth on pages 78-80 of the book Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses, by Henry Wechsler and Bernice Wuethrich. Via an interview format, Wagenaar claims that, "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that the [Minimum Legal Drinking Age of 21] saved more than twenty thousand lives since the 1970s." He discusses some examples of inverse (negative) correlations, where in the 1970s, a state's lowering of the drinking age was associated with increases in teen alcohol fatalities, and vice-versa. Wagenaar characterizes the research as "incontrovertible evidence that the policy has had a significant effect on drinking rates and deaths."

Other scholars take a different view, however. In a 1999 article, Ruth Engs cites the idea of the "forbidden fruit," where the illegality of some act increases its attractiveness. She acknowledges the reduction over time in drinking-and-driving related problems, but questions how much of it can be attributed directly to the federal legislation that encouraged a uniform 21-year-old drinking age. Further, she cites statistics purporting to show that other indicia of problematic college-student drinking actually rose after passage of the legislation. Foreshadowing the Amethyst presidents' statement quoted above, Engs contends that:

This increase in abusive drinking behavior is due to "underground drinking" outside of adult supervision in student rooms and apartments where same-age individuals come together in the 1990s collegiate reincarnation of the speakeasy.

David Hanson's website also presents a lot of information on drinking-age policies (it was here that I learned of Engs's writings).

The debate over the legal drinking age is very likely to continue. By following the links included in the present write-up, as well as doing your own research, readers of this blog can contribute to the debate.

2008-08-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

This past weekend a CNN/Money Magazine article came out, reporting on companies' efforts to attract new college graduates (also known as Millenials or Generation Y) by demonstrating commitments to community service and environmental awareness. The article notes that:

For this generation, a company's community involvement often needs to be more than just talk, experts said. Nearly four in five Millennials say they want to work for a company that cares about how it affects or contributes to society, according to a 2006 Cone survey. Some 68% said they would refuse to work for an employer that is not socially responsible.

The research firm alluded to in the quoted paragraph is Cone, Inc., some of whose research reports are available here.

2008-08-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

Jeff Arnett has just sent me some EA-related references in the media:

Here's a good pop culture quote for your website, from 27 year-old former tennis star Anna Kournikova, in [a July] issue of Sports Illustrated (link):

"Here's one thing I don't get. Why are people afraid of getting older? You feel wiser. You feel more mature. You feel like you know yourself better. You would trade that for softer skin? Not me!"

Also, have you heard the megahit song by Fergie, "Big Girls Don't Cry"? It includes this lyric:

The path that I'm walking
I must go alone
I must take my baby steps 'til I'm full grown...
[SNIP]

I hope you know, I hope you know
That this has nothing to do with you
It's personal, myself and I
We've got some figuring out to do
And I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket
But I've gotta get a move on with my life
It's time to be a big girl now
And big girls don't cry.

2008-07-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

An article from this past May in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Daily Cardinal discusses the pros and cons of students' getting married during (or shortly after completing) their college education, as opposed to waiting longer.

Whereas much of the article talks about stress and relationship skills (e.g., communication), the part that appears to fit most directly with Emerging Adulthood theory involves the sense of self-focus. The Daily Cardinal article quotes Darald Hanusa, who is described as a "senior lecturer in the school of social work" at UW, as follows:

“[Many students are] still in a very … ‘me’ focus versus ‘us’ focus,” Hanusa said. “Those relationships aren’t going to do well but those people are probably going to have difficulty in any relationship, no matter how long they wait.”

The online column "Lifehacker" (scroll down to section FOUR when the new page comes up) quotes Jeffrey Arnett discussing his 2004 book, Emerging Adulthood: The winding road from late teens through the twenties, and the self-focused aspect of EA in particular:

"In my book, I call emerging adulthood a 'self-focused' age," says Arnett. "Not selfish, but self-focused. They now have the freedom to focus on their own development, more so than when they were younger, and had adults telling them what to do, or when they become older, and have a spouse, and kids, and long-term job to tend to."

2008-07-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Continuing with a recent theme I've developed on this blog, the economic situation facing young adults today in the U.S., I wanted to mention the recent book The Price of Independence: The Economics of Early Adulthood. Princeton University posted an interview with Cecilia Rouse, a co-editor of the book. In addressing trends of young adults living with their parents or with other, non-marital roommates, Rouse's answer encompasses more than just economic features:

When the [book's] authors looked at the different potential economic factors — debt, housing costs, the economy, etc. — they found that these factors do play some role in some of these changing trends... But you could also argue that in all of these countries, including the U.S., there have been big changes in the social norms.

I encourage everyone to read the full interview, which is available at the above link. Another good source for studies of the economics of young adults is the "Demos" research organization (list of articles by this group).

Happy Fourth of July everyone, and enjoy the fireworks!

2008-06-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

Personal finance writer Kathy Kristof offers advice to new college graduates on managing their money in the coming years. A key piece of her advice is conveyed in the following passages:

There are a handful of money moves you can make now that will virtually ensure your financial security -- and possibly create great wealth -- later in life. The younger you are, the greater the opportunities and the easier the wealth strategies are to execute. But if you start out spending too much, too fast, your ability to set yourself up for long-term wealth diminishes and eventually evaporates. That makes the first months and years after graduation pivotal to lifetime financial security...

The key, experts say, is a simple one: Live like a poor college student for a couple more years. While you're doing that, you can pay off your debt, start a savings plan and embrace healthy habits that will serve you well for life.

Given that many new college graduates will be eager to accelerate their transition to full-fledged adulthood, and perhaps see acquisition of material goods as a way to do so, Kristof's advice is particularly important.

2008-06-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

The people who've put on the biennial Emerging Adulthood conferences (Jeff Arnett, Jennifer Tanner, and others) have moved forward in crystallizing their informal working group into a formal organization, namely the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood. As part of this growth, there's been a major revamping of the group's website. The website states that a 2009 conference will be held, but details are not yet available.

2008-03-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

Election news website The Politico has a component entitled Campus Politico to cover issues related to young voters. The word "campus" strongly implies a focus on college-student voters, but coverage is also being given to non-college youth. A new article, for example, reports that individuals under age 30 with at least some college have voted in some of the major presidential primary elections this season at a far higher rate than their similar-age counterparts who never attended college.

Such a result is hardly surprising. In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam notes that greater amounts of education are associated with greater civic engagement (p. 18). Still, greater attention to young voters -- especially those not attending college -- is worthwhile.

2008-02-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

Welcome to visitors who have arrived at this site via the NCFR Report's Family Focus on the Transition to Adulthood! The Family Focus section includes eight articles on the transition to adulthood, including one by me and my colleagues. As I read the other articles, I may share some reactions on this blog.

I invite you to browse the blog postings that appear sequentially up and down the page, and in the archives. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact me at alan.reifman@ttu.edu.

2008-01-17T22:45:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times had an interesting article on whether the current generation of young people are more narcissistic than those of previous decades. Two sets of researchers looked into this question and came up with vastly different conclusions. (Thanks to Sylvia Niehuis for sending me the link.)

2008-01-06T13:20:00.000-08:00

AOL and pollster John Zogby (best known for his election surveys) teamed up for a national study of 20-69 year-olds' views of love and relationships. Summaries of the findings are available [this link updated 10/3/08].

Of greatest relevance to Emerging Adulthood, of course, are the results for the youngest respondents in the survey. Several age-group differences are discussed in the aforementioned results document, but they appear fairly modest in magnitude. For example:

More than 4 in 10 Americans (44%), including 50% in their 20s don't believe that they need to be married to validate the commitment of a long-term relationship...

As I've often expressed in the past, studying the dynamics of young adults' attitudes, decision-making, and relationship establishment in the romantic domain would seem to be a fruitful research area.

2007-12-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

Early this morning, National Public Radio ran a segment on Emerging Adulthood, including quotes from Jeff Arnett. Click here to listen to the piece.

2007-12-15T22:28:00.000-08:00

One of the topics I like to discuss on this blog is emerging adults' political views and, with the 2008 presidential primary season getting underway soon, a recent poll provides some interesting findings.

According to an article on the "Politico" website, a Harvard Institute of Politics survey of 18-24 year-olds nationally shows a difference in the preferences of Democratic-leaning respondents, based on whether or not they're attending college:

[Barack] Obama leads [Hillary] Clinton 43 percent to 23 percent among current college students — but Clinton leads Obama among youth who never enrolled in college, 38 percent to 31 percent.

The Politico article also notes expert opinion on why these results may have emerged:

John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics, says that the disparity reflects a class divide. Just as Obama does better among students, he does better among young people from wealthier families. Young Democrats from lower-income families are more likely to favor Clinton, according to Della Volpe.

“Clinton is seen as more of a traditional lunch-pail Democrat,” said Della Volpe. “She is concerned with domestic issues.”

Iowa State University sociology professor Bill Woodman, whose students have studied the campaign, is also quoted to the effect that, "supporting Obama has picked up a self-perpetuating cool factor on campus."

The report of the survey directly from the Harvard IOP also discussed the candidate preferences of Republican-leaning 18-24 year-olds, but the college/non-college distinction is not highlighted.

The inclusion of young people not attending college, as well as their college counterparts, is an important element of the IOP survey. Given that social scientists are heavily based at universities, college students are a readily available population to study. The relative exclusion of same-age non-college individuals from research studies has led many scholars to label this group the "Forgotten Half" (click here for an example).

Only by studying both college- and non-college-bound youth can research on Emerging Adulthood reach its full potential.

2007-12-11T18:45:00.001-08:00

The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) has established a new journal this year, called Child Development Perspectives. The December issue includes a special series of articles (11 in all), under the rubric "Emerging Adulthood Around the World" (Table of Contents).

Consistent with the theme, several articles report on EA in different regions and countries of the world. There's also a debate between Jeffrey Arnett, who first proposed the specific stage of EA in 2000, and EA critics Leo B. Hendry and Marion Kloep.

From my initial skimming of several of the articles, they appear to provide a lot of interesting material on EA, and where it should go from here.

2007-10-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

The article that I wrote with Jeff Arnett and my Texas Tech faculty colleague Malinda Colwell, introducing our Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA) measure and providing reliability and validity information, has now been published. The article appears in the Summer 2007 issue of the Journal of Youth Development, a relatively new online publication (see links section on the right). We hope EA researchers will find the article and measure to be useful. Practical applications for families and educators are also discussed in the article.

2007-10-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has created a "30 Something Working Group" within her party's caucus. Although the participating House members are older than what would generally be considered the Emerging Adulthood range, the working group appears to be focusing its agenda toward young adults pretty broadly (also, one must be at least 25 years old to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, so individuals in the traditional EA range of 18-25 years old would be almost entirely ineligible to run). According to the 30 Something group's mission statement:

These Members are committed to engaging the next generation of Americans further in government and the political process. "30 Something" Members seek to talk and listen to young Americans about the issues they care about and how Congress can better represent their opinions on those issues.

Among the specific issues mentioned on the 30 Somethings' website are college cost reduction and raising the minimum wage, both of which are important to large numbers of young people who are transitioning to adulthood.

I also checked the website of Republican floor leader John Boehner and didn't find any signs of a similar project within the GOP.

2007-08-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

The "Life" section in today's USA Today featured an article entitled "Walking the tightrope of the 20s: Risky behavior doesn't end with teen years."

Those of you who've studied Emerging Adulthood (EA) in some depth probably will find little that is new in this article. However, for those seeking an introduction to the themes of EA, I think the article could be very useful.

Three of the main themes touched upon include:

*Demographic trends: "Young people today are delaying settling down into careers and marriage..."

*How individuals in the early 20-ish, EA years are largely free from constraints. One observer is quoted as saying that, "There are no parents telling them, 'You can't do this.' It's pretty much a free-for-all." The article also notes that, "All sorts of research suggests that by the late 20s, risky behavior drops among young adults, largely because that's when they pair up and begin to settle down with a career and a partner."

*The brain-development aspect: "Over the past several years, brain studies by researchers around the country... have found that the area that controls impulses takes longer to mature than previously thought."

Jeffrey Arnett and a number of other researchers also are quoted.

2007-06-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times reports the results of a national survey of 17-29 year-olds, conducted by the Times along with CBS News and MTV. As I've noted before in conjunction with NY Times articles, free full-text access may disappear after a few days, so if you're at a university or other library that subscribes to Lexis/Nexis, that may be the best way to access the article in the long term.

Headlined "New Poll Finds That Young Americans Are Leaning Left," the article focuses on political opinions and presidential candidate preferences for 2008. One of the more interesting findings, in my view, was the following:

By any measure, the poll suggests that young Americans are anything but apathetic about the presidential election. Fifty-eight percent said they were paying attention to the campaign. By contrast, at this point in the 2004 presidential campaign, 35 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they were paying a lot or some attention to the campaign.

A supplemental PDF document listing all the questions and the response frequencies for each question's possible choices also provides a nice snapshot of the emerging adult population of the U.S., beyond political preferences.

For example, 22% of respondents were married, 73% never-married, and the rest divorced or separated. Thirty-one percent of the sample reported having children. In terms of highest educational level yet achieved, the sample was virtually evenly split between high school diploma or less, and at least some college.

In response to a question about networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook, 56% of participants reported having their own page, 15% had only visited such pages, and 30% had not visited any.

2007-06-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on tattoo removal has just come out in the New York Times, entitled "Erasing Tattoos, Out of Regret or Simply to Get a Fresh Canvas" (by Natasha Singer, June 17, 2007). I'm not sure how long the article link will work, but those of you at universities that subscribe to Lexis/Nexis may be able to access the article that way in the future, via the citation I've provided.

Nowhere in the article does the team "emerging adulthood" appear. However, based on some of the age statistics cited and the comments of people interviewed for the article, EA-relevant themes appear to lurk beneath the surface. Here's one passage, for example:

Most of Dr. Tattoff’s [not the name of a real doctor, but rather of a tattoo-removal service] clients are women ages 25 to 35, said James Morel, the chief executive of the company, which has given more than 13,000 tattoo laser treatments since opening here in 2004. “Maybe women are getting more tattoos than they used to,” Mr. Morel said, “or maybe they just have a higher level of tattoo regret than men.”

Aside from the gender aspect, the 25-35 age-range dovetails well with when the exploratory/experimentation-oriented years of emerging adulthood should be ending and more "serious" pursuits are being undertaken.

A quote from tattoo-removal client David Donch of New Jersey reinforces that theme:

Mr. Donch said the treatments felt like rubber bands being snapped against his skin but that it was worth it. “As I am getting older and planning to start a family and get my teaching certificate, I am more aware that appearances are important,” Mr. Donch said.

2007-04-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading the book Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, by Alexandra Robbins. The book is a few years old (2004) and I was able to get a copy from a bookstore's discount shelf.

Robbins has strong connections to the study of Emerging Adulthood, having co-authored (with Abby Wilner), the 2001 book Quarterlife Crisis, which studies difficulties in the transition from college to the labor force. In connection with this book, Robbins appeared on a radio show with Jeffrey Arnett (see links section on the right of this page).

Participation in a sorority would seem to be a life experience that may affect -- for better or for worse -- a young woman's transition to adulthood, perhaps via some of the mechanisms discussed in the Emerging Adulthood literature. However, Robbins does not devote much discussion to individual development until the latter parts of the book, when she reflects upon how the sorority sisters she followed (whose names were disguised) may have changed over the course of the year.

One exception to the dearth of EA-related content is Robbins's examination of sorority members' potential for identity development. Not only do there appear to be rampant conformity pressures in the houses; from a given sorority's national office on down, there are numerous traditions, requirements, and expectations. Writes Robbins:

The danger of sororities, it became clear, is that instead of enhancing a girl's identity as she shifts from her formative years toward adulthood, the sisterhood could have a tendency to swallow that identity altogether (p. 175).

Another salient theme within EA is self-focus, as one takes on greater responsibilities and becomes more self-sufficient than before. It is here, in dealing with personality clashes, house politics, and substantial time demands, that sorority members may profit as they they move into the "real world." As Robbins conveys two sisters' thoughts on their own transformation during the past year:

"The way I see it, [these negatives are] just a part of life. I feel like from now on, I'm always going to have to juggle commitments and somehow you have to make them work out. So this is practice, I guess," [Sabrina] said. "Maybe once I'm in the real world I'll have an easier time being independent than my sisters" (p. 302; the phrase "these negatives are" was inserted by Robbins, the name "Sabrina" was inserted by me).

Caitlin concluded that she had changed more this year than any other year in her life. She had finally learned that at some point she simply had to give up her futile efforts to please her mother. It had taken an extraordinary amount of turmoil for her to feel like she was finally growing up, and now that she had wrestled with so many issues, it dawned on her that she was gradually starting to become what she had always pretended to be on the outside but was not truly until now. She was becoming -- she thought -- strong (p. 314).

Never having been involved with the Greek system myself, I saw Pledged as an interesting window into what, at some colleges and universities, is a major factor in campus life. That's not to say that Pledged offers a representative portrait of every sorority in the country, or even of the ones Robbins reported on. As a vehicle to study human development, the book is sporadic, at best. The subject matter is inherently interesting, in my view, and also offers a rich view of group dynamics.

2007-03-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

One of the central ideas of Emerging Adulthood is that young people are taking longer to explore and settle into fully adult roles, than in past generations. One example of this is the increase in the median age at first marriage in the U.S.

Jeffrey Arnett, whose writings introduced the term "Emerging Adulthood" and the set of ideas for studying it, was quoted as follows in a 2005 TIME magazine article on "twixters," a group similar to emerging adults (see page 5 of article).

Arnett is worried that if anything, twixters are too romantic. In their universe, romance is totally detached from pragmatic concerns and societal pressures, so when twixters finally do marry, they're going to do it for Love with a capital L and no other reason. "Everybody wants to find their soul mate now," Arnett says, "whereas I think, for my parents' generation—I'm 47—they looked at it much more practically. I think a lot of people are going to end up being disappointed with the person that's snoring next to them by the time they've been married for a few years and they realize it doesn't work that way."

Another trend among young people in recent years is the phenomenon of "hooking up," as described in this article and a new book cited therein. Hooking up is consistent with the idea that many emerging adults want to delay the establishment of serious romantic relationships -- perhaps to devote more energy to their careers -- but still want to enjoy some physical affection.

One of our graduate students at Texas Tech is planning to start some research on hooking up and Emerging Adulthood.

2007-03-07T15:25:00.000-08:00

At last month's Emerging Adulthood conference in Tucson, Arizona (see summary in my previous posting below), a speaker in the same session with me gave a presentation on how a Tucson youth club helps to promote civic engagement and empowerment in young people. University of Arizona researcher Joyce Serido, whose co-author was Lynne Borden, gave a talk at the conference entitled, "From Program Participant To Community Activist: A Developmental Journey." The abstract from the EA conference talk is available here, alphabetically within the letter S, whereas the abstract from a similar presentation elsewhere is available here (bottom of p. 11).

In the Q & A session after the talks, several audience members wanted to know more about the youth club at the center of Joyce's presentation. In response, she stated that the club is called "Skrappy's," and that it puts on performances by music bands, among other activities. As stated in the group's My Space page (ALL CAPS in original):

SKRAPPY'S IS MORE THAN A PLACE FOR MUSIC- IT IS A YOUTH COMMUNITY. SKRAPPY'S IS A SAFE, POSITIVE, DRUG & ALCOHOL FREE ENVIRONMENT FOR YOUNG PEOPLE TO FREELY EXPRESS THEMSELVES THROUGH MUSIC, THEATRE, ART, JOURNALISM, DANCE AND LIFESTYLES. SKRAPPY'S ENCOURAGES YOUTH TO EMBRACE WHO THEY ARE AND HELPS THEM ACHIEVE THEIR GOALS.

YOUNG PEOPLE INVOLVED AT SKRAPPY'S LEARN VALUABLE LIFE AND SOCIAL SKILLS. WHETHER THEY ARE HELPING RUN THE CENTER, PLAYING IN A BAND OR PARTICIPATING IN A CLASS ACTIVITY, THEY INCREASE THEIR SELF-ESTEEM, REFINE LEADERSHIP SKILLS AND STRENGTHEN THEIR SENSE OF COMMUNITY.

2007-02-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, the 3rd biennial (more or less) conference on Emerging Adulthood was held, this time in Tucson, Arizona, near the University of Arizona campus. Previous EA conferences had been held in Miami (February 2005) and Cambridge, Massachusetts (November 2003). Abstracts from EA '07 are available here. Also, below are a few pictures I (and others) took at the '07 conference (you can click directly on the photos to enlarge them).

Pictured above, in a dark seminar room, are several members of the Texas Tech University Human Development and Family Studies contingent that attended the conference. Judy Fischer (faculty) is shown front and center. From left to right in the back row, those pictured are: Rick Herbert (graduate student), Jackie Wiersma (graduate student), myself (Alan Reifman, faculty), Bo Cleveland (faculty), and Jacki Fitzpatrick (faculty). [Note that the above photo replaces an earlier one I had up, on which the pictured individuals did not show up as well in the dark.]

This next picture shows the speakers in the session I was in.

Preliminary planning for the next Emerging Adulthood conference, in 2009, is underway. All attendees at the recent conference received a questionnaire, seeking suggestions for the next one.

2007-02-14T07:13:00.000-08:00

Welcome to attendees of the 3rd Conference on Emerging Adulthood in Tucson, Arizona! I believe this website would be of general interest to everyone involved in EA research, but in particular, those of you attending the brown bag session on teaching EA may be most likely to find classroom applications from the resources on this page.

The links column on the right puts you one click away from a variety of sources on EA and related topics. The main write-ups provide concise discussions of various topics related to EA (often with external links embedded therein). Visitors can leave comments at the end of each write-up. Entries currently available (below) include:

January 22, 2007 -- Emerging Adulthood in the Culture and Media

January 21, 2007 -- Emerging Adulthood and Substance Use

January 20, 2007 -- Introductory Message on Emerging Adulthood

If you'd like to submit a lead essay as a guest contributor, please e-mail me via my faculty website at the top of the links column.

2007-01-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

In addition to the academic research literature, another way I like to track Emerging Adulthood-related phenomena is through the popular culture and media. If you're watching a show featuring individuals in their early 20s (give or take a few years), there's a good chance you'll hear something that ties into an EA theme, such as identity exploration (or "finding oneself"), feeling "in-between," and seeking romantic partners. Whenever I hear such a statement, I either try to find a transcript on the web or, in the case of one television show that frequently repeats its recent episodes, I record the show the next time and write down the exact statement. Several examples follow...

In a February 2002 interview with the Associated Press, then-27 year-old singer Jewel Kilcher (usually known by just her first name), participated in the following dialogue with the reporter.

Question: You've got a big ring on your finger. Do you have some marriage plans?

Kilcher: No -- wrong finger! ... I'd like a family probably one day, but ... I don't feel like an adult quite yet.

Oprah Winfrey, on the December 9, 2003 show of Larry King Live, answered a caller's question regarding the 20s age range, in part, as follows (full transcript, see call from Boonsboro, Maryland):

...the 20s are the time when you're finding out who you are. And so if you're ever going to be lost, 24 is the time to be seeking and finding yourself. So don't -- this is what I say to people in their 20s, don't beat yourself up about it... you always feel like you're not doing enough, you're not getting ahead. You wish you were doing more, and why -- why aren't things more settled? They're not supposed to be in your 20s.

Alexandra Robbins, co-author of Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenge of Life in your Twenties, made the following observation in her appearance with Jeffrey Arnett on the Diane Rehm radio show (see links section on right to access audio of the broadcast):

...30 is the new 20

In other words, things that in earlier eras many people used to do around age 20, are now being done around age 30 (e.g., marriage, setting up own household).

Popular music is no exception to the trend, as exemplified in the following two songs.

First, there's the Britney Spears song, "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" (brought to my attention by Jeff Arnett). Note the lyrics that say:

It's time that I
Learn to face up to this on my own

Arnett (2001, Journal of Adult Development) found that most survey respondents felt criteria such as "Accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions" and "Decide on personal beliefs and values independently of parents or other influences" were necessary before one could be considered an adult.

Martina McBride's song, "This One's for the Girls," traces the process of growing into adulthood, including a reference to the difficulties that sometimes occur during the Emerging Adulthood years:

This is for all you girls about twenty-five
In a little apartment, just trying to get by
Living on, on dreams and Spaghetti-O's
Wondering where you life is gonna go

Finally, I've been collecting EA-relevant quotes from episodes of MTV's The Real World-- a show where a group of people in (roughly) their early 20s lives together in a house, with their daily lives on display to the camera.

... I think it's important for me to get rid of the party-girl side of me, so I can embrace the housewife/grown-up side of me. -- Rachel, 10/18/05 episode, Austin, TX season

Football was my life and that's really all that I knew. I was totally dedicated to it. When that didn't happen, it totally changed my life. And so, here I am now, trying to really figure out who I am. -- M.J., 2/22/05 episode, Philadelphia season

This is your youth. This is supposed to be the best time in your life, where you're trying to find yourself, find who you are, find what kind of person you want to be with. -- Cameran (to Brad) in season opener, January 2004, San Diego season

I'm definitely afraid of growing up... scared to death of it. If I had my choice, I would be 21 forever. -- Ace, 8/26/03 episode, Paris season

It's all about the conflicts between being young, and being in this awesome situation, with cool people in the very same house and wanting to act like I'm 22. The conflict between that and loving Nicole [girlfriend from before] and trying to be a grown-up. -- Kyle, 2/5/02 episode, Chicago season

I'm allowed to be scared of getting to know myself. That's what this next decade is for, right? -- Cara (age 22), 4/9/02 episode, Chicago season

Lastly, here's a picture of me, visiting the Real World Chicago house while in town for the American Psychological Association convention in August 2002 (the cast members moved out of the house several months earlier).

2007-01-21T11:53:00.000-08:00

One of the more active research areas in Emerging Adulthood is its relation to alcohol and other substance use. As Arnett noted in his 2000 American Psychologist article, rates of binge drinking and other risky behaviors peak within EA.

According to more recent U.S. government surveys, heavy drinking (based on a measure of consuming five or more drinks per drinking occasion) tends to be more prevalent in 18-25 year-olds than in other age groups.

Risk behavior may be linked to identity exploration, as "one reflection of the desire to obtain a wide range of experiences before settling down into the roles and responsibilities of adult life" (Arnett, 2000, p. 475).

With particular reference to higher education, Borsari and Carey (2001, Journal of Substance Abuse) contend that, "...many [students] view college as a place to drink excessively, in a time-limited fashion, before assuming the responsibilities of aduthood" (p. 392).

Finally, an article in a 2004 issue of the National Institute on Drug Abuse newsletter NIDA Notes discusses Emerging Adulthood and substance use during this period.

For further reading, see...

Chassin, L., Pitts, S.C., & Prost, J. (2002). Binge drinking trajectories from adolescence to emerging adulthood in a high-risk sample: Predictors and substance abuse outcomes. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70, 67-78 (abstract).

White, H.R., & Jackson, K. (2004/2005). Social and psychological influences on emerging adult drinking behavior. Alcohol Research and Health, 28, 182-190 (full-text PDF).

2007-01-20T18:16:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the re-launching of my Emerging Adulthood (EA) website in blog format. For the last several years, I have maintained a conventional website on EA. However, blog format offers several advantages such as the address (URL) being easier for people to remember, more visually appealing graphics, automation of the archiving function, and the opportunity for visitors to post comments.

Eventually, all the content on my previous EA site will be moved here. The links to EA-relevant pages already have been moved here, along the right-hand column. This includes a link to the Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA), a questionnaire measurement instrument that I developed with Jeff Arnett and Malinda Colwell; this link is in the top section on the right-hand part of the page.

Since this is an introductory message, in a sense, it would probably be good to restate some of the definitions of Emerging Adulthood, especially for anyone who is a first-time visitor. So here goes...

Arnett (2000, in American Psychologist) proposed that the time of life roughly between ages 18-25 be considered a "distinct period" called Emerging Adulthood.

Essentially, this is a time when individuals would likely consider themselves too old to be adolescents, but not yet full-fledged adults. From the perspective of Erikson's lifespan theory, it would be like going back and inserting Emerging Adulthood in between Stages 5 and 6 on this chart. Identity and intimacy are also goals during EA, as well as during the adjacent stages. According to Arnett (2000):

Having left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood, emerging adults often explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and worldviews (p. 469).

EA is likely to be most prevalent in industrialized/technological societies where high levels of education are needed to obtain prestigious/high-paying jobs -- advanced educational training thus tends to postpone marriage and having children.

I'll keep adding to this new page in the coming days, and I hope you'll become a regular visitor!