Requisite Metamorphoses

Author(s):  
Tammy J. Halstead

Emerging adults who are at the intersection of college and work face a complex and challenging transition. In addition to finding employment, graduates seek to define and explore long-term career paths, form personal and professional identities, develop new support systems, and learn the mores and culture of the new environment of work. They approach these challenges while also moving through emerging adulthood, a development phase that precedes the feeling of being fully adult. In short, a successful college-to-work transition requires graduates to move through a series of metamorphoses. This chapter explores these metamorphoses and the experiences of graduates who are experiencing them. It also suggests ways colleges and universities can support the needs of their students and graduates and things emerging adults can do themselves to foster their successful metamorphoses.

Author(s):  
Shmuel Shulman ◽  
Jennifer Connolly

Whereas theories of romantic stage development suggest that youth in the period of emerging adulthood are fully capable of commitment to an intimate romantic relationship, recent research suggests that the relationships of many young people are quite different. Marriage and other forms of deep commitment are delayed while many youth engage in short-term casual encounters or in noncommitted relationships. This chapter suggests that these data pose a challenge to stage theories, one that can be reconciled by considering the developmental life tasks that emerging adults must simultaneously resolve. The authors propose a transitional emerging adult romantic stage, coordinating romance and life plans, in which young people strive to integrate career paths and life plans with those of a romantic partner. Resolution of this stage provides the grounding for long-term commitment to a life partner. This proposal is discussed within the perspective of life cycle and evolutionary life history theories.


Author(s):  
Varda Konstam

This introductory chapter provides an overview of emerging adults and the challenges they face. It examines the unstable nature of emerging adulthood itself as a prelude to the discussion of the romantic lives of emerging adults. Tending to view relationships as either undependable or too difficult to manage at this point in their lives, emerging adults are retaining their independence longer and putting a heavier reliance on nonromantic relationships. On the other hand, most of them do foresee getting married and are desirous of forming long-term, trusting relationships. Emerging adults are apparent contradictions and this book aims to shed some light on how and why this is so. This introductory chapter also describes the methods used for the book’s original research and summarizes the chapter content. It concludes with a “case study” of one emerging adult research participant.


Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This chapter begins by providing a historical context for the Millennial generation. Growing up is different in the 21st century than before; it takes much longer. Given how many years youth take to explore their identities before they emerge into adulthood with stable jobs and committed partners, the chapter reviews what we now about “emerging adulthood” as a stage of human development. The chapter also highlights a debate in social science as to whether Millennials are entitled narcissists or a new civically engaged generation that will re-energize America. The chapter concludes with an overview of another debate, whether Millennials are pushing the gender revolution forward or returning to more traditional beliefs.


Author(s):  
Michael W. Pratt ◽  
M. Kyle Matsuba

Chapter 7 begins with an overview of Erikson’s ideas about intimacy and its place in the life cycle, followed by a summary of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment theory framework and its relation to family development. The authors review existing longitudinal research on the development of family relationships in adolescence and emerging adulthood, focusing on evidence with regard to links to McAdams and Pals’ personality model. They discuss the evidence, both questionnaire and narrative, from the Futures Study data set on family relationships, including emerging adults’ relations with parents and, separately, with grandparents, as well as their anticipations of their own parenthood. As a way of illustrating the key personality concepts from this family chapter, the authors end with a case study of Jane Fonda in youth and her father, Henry Fonda, to illustrate these issues through the lives of a 20th-century Hollywood dynasty of actors.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2199385
Author(s):  
Muna Osman ◽  
Dave Miranda

Feelings of alienation with parents and peers can lead to psychological distress, possibly because such feelings are stressful. Supportive siblings are known to foster mental health in youth, but research in emerging adulthood is limited. We hypothesized supportive sibling climate as a protective factor in the risks that stress from parent and peer alienation poses to psychological distress among emerging adults. A proposed moderated-mediation model was tested, across three samples, using latent moderated mediation structural equation modeling. Results indicated that parental and peer alienation were associated with more psychological distress, and stress partially mediated the link between parental (but not peer) alienation and psychological distress in two samples. However, a supportive sibling climate was not protective as it did not moderate the links among alienation, stress, and psychological distress. In sum, siblings seem beneficial, but perhaps it is not sufficient to protect emerging adults’ mental health against stress from parent and peer alienation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107769582199224
Author(s):  
David A. Craig ◽  
Patrick Lee Plaisance ◽  
Erin Schauster ◽  
Ryan J. Thomas ◽  
Chris Roberts ◽  
...  

A growing body of psychology-based scholarship identifies emerging adulthood as a distinct, transitional stage of life and work characterized by several features, wherein relatively little is known regarding moral development. This study is part of a 3-year, longitudinal project involving recent graduates across six U.S. universities who studied journalism and media-related fields. Guided by emerging adulthood, moral psychology, and media exemplar research, this study analyzes results for 110 graduates who completed an online survey regarding their personality traits, virtuous character, moral reasoning, and ethical ideology. It constitutes the first detailed portrait of moral identity of emerging adults in media-related fields.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2110575
Author(s):  
Ashley B. LeBaron-Black ◽  
Matthew T. Saxey ◽  
Toby M. Driggs ◽  
Melissa A. Curran

While a plethora of research has found that parent financial socialization during childhood and adolescence is linked with financial outcomes in emerging adulthood, recent literature suggests that financial socialization may also impact romantic relationship outcomes in emerging adulthood. Utilizing a sample of 1,950 U.S. emerging adults, we test whether retrospectively recalled parent financial socialization is associated with romantic relationship flourishing and whether this association is mediated by financial behaviors and financial distress. We found that financial socialization was positively associated with financial behaviors and relationship flourishing and was negatively associated with financial distress. Further, financial behaviors partially mediated the association between financial socialization and relationship flourishing, while financial distress did not mediate the association. Together with previous literature, these findings provide useful information for therapists and educators in their pursuit to promote robust parent financial socialization in childhood and adolescence and both financial and relational well-being in emerging adulthood.


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