Emerging Adulthood: What Is It, and What Is It Good For?

This article asserts that the theory of emerging adulthood is a useful way of conceptualizing the lives of people from their late teens to their midto late 20s in industrialized societies. The place of emerging adulthood within the adult life course is discussed. The weaknesses of previous terms for this age period are examined, and emerging adulthood is argued to be preferable as a new term for a new phenomenon. With respect to the question of whether emerging adulthood is experienced positively or negatively by most people, it is argued that it is positive formost people but entails developmental challenges that may be difficult and there is great heterogeneity, with some emerging adults experiencing serious problems. With respect to the question of whether or not emerging adulthood is good for society, it is argued that claims of the dangers of emerging adulthood are overblown, but emerging adulthood is probably a mixed blessing for society. KEYWORDS—emerging adulthood; young adulthood; transition to adulthood It is now 7 years since I first proposed the term emerging adulthood for the age period from the late teens through themidto late 20s (roughly ages 18–25) in an article in American Psychologist (Arnett, 2000). I had mentioned the term briefly in two previous articles (Arnett, 1998; Arnett & Taber, 1994), but the 2000 article was the first time I presented an outline of the theory. It was not until 2004 that I proposed a full theory in a book on emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2004). In a short time, the theory has become widely used, not just in psychology but in many fields. At the recent Third Conference on Emerging Adulthood (see www.ssea.org), a remarkable range of disciplines was represented, including psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, education, epidemiology, health sciences, human development, geography, nursing, social work, philosophy, pediatrics, family studies, journalism, and law. The swift spread of the term and the idea has surprised me because normally any new theoretical idea meets initial resistance from defenders of the reigning paradigm. Perhaps, the acceptance of emerging adulthood has been so swift because there really was no reigning paradigm. Instead, there was a widespread sense among scholars interested in this age period that previous ways of thinking about it no longer worked and there was a hunger for a new conceptualization. In any case, now that emerging adulthood has become established as a way of thinking about the age period from the late teens through at least the mid-20s, the theory is attracting commentary and critiques (e.g., Bynner, 2005). This is a normal and healthy part of the development of any new theory, and I welcome the exchange here with Leo Hendry and Marion Kloep. THE CONFIGURATION OF EMERGING ADULTHOOD: HOW DOES IT FIT INTO THE LIFE COURSE? When I first proposed the theory of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000), one of my goals was to draw attention to the age period from the late teens through the mid-20s as a new period of the life course in industrialized societies, with distinctive developmental characteristics. The dominant theory of the life course in developmental psychology, first proposed by Erikson (1950), postulated that adolescence, lasting from the beginning of puberty until the late teens, was followed by young adulthood, lasting from the late teens to about age 40 when middle adulthood began. This paradigm may have made sense in the middle of the 20th century when most people in industrialized societies married and entered stable full-time work by around age 20 or shortly after. However, by the end of the century, this paradigm no longer fit the normative pattern in industrialized societies. Median ages of marriage had risen into the late 20s, and the early to mid-20s became a time of frequent job changes Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01602; e-mail: arnett@ jeffreyarnett.com. 68 # 2007, Copyright the Author(s) Journal compilation # 2007, Society for Research in Child Development Volume 1—Number 2, Pages 68–73 and, for many people, pursuit of postsecondary education or training. Furthermore, sexual mores had changed dramatically, and premarital sex and cohabitation in the 20s had become widely accepted. Most young people now spent the period from their late teens to their mid-20s not settling into long-term adult roles but trying out different experiences and gradually making their way toward enduring choices in love and work. The theory of emerging adulthood was proposed as a framework for recognizing that the transition to adulthood was now long enough that it constituted not merely a transition but a separate period of the life course. I proposed five features that make emerging adulthood distinct: it is the age of identity explorations, the age of instability, the self-focused age, the age of feeling in-between, and the age of possibilities (Arnett, 2004). But I emphasized from the beginning that emerging adulthood is perhaps the most heterogeneous period of the life course because it is the least structured, and the five features were not proposed as universal features but as features that are more common during emerging adulthood than in other periods. In this light, of the possible configurations A–D in Figure 1 of how emerging adulthood might fit into the adult life course, I would reject D because it does not show a distinct period between adolescence and adulthood. C does not work because it slights emerging adulthood, inaccurately portraying it as a brief transition between adolescence and adulthood. A is better, but it shows the transitions from adolescence to emerging adulthood and from emerging adulthood to young adulthood as more discrete than they actually are in some respects. It applies to transitions from adolescence to emerging adulthood such as finishing secondary school and reaching the legal age of adult status, and perhaps to transitions from emerging to young adulthood such as marriage. However, B works best in my view because the five features described above are entered and exited not discretely but gradually. Furthermore, of the three criteria found in many countries and cultures to be the most important markers of reaching adult status—accepting responsibility for oneself, making independent decisions, and becoming financially independent—all are attained gradually in the course of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2001, 2003; Facio &Micocci, 2003; Macek, Bejc̆ek, &Vanı́c̆ková, 2007; Mayseless & Scharf, 2003; Nelson, Badger, & Wu, 2004). This gradual passage from one period to the next may apply not just to emerging adulthood but to the entire adult life course. Theorists have emphasized how in recent decades the life course in industrialized societies has become increasingly characterized by individualization, meaning that institutional constraints and supports have become less powerful and important and people are increasingly left to their own resources in making their way from one part of the life course to the next, for better or worse (e.g., Côté, 2000; Heinz, 2002). Emerging adulthood is one part of this trend. So, in Figure 1, an improvement on B might be E, showing gradual transitions into and out of different periods throughout the adult life course. DO WE REALLY NEED THE TERM EMERGING