From Childhood to Adulthood: A Site for Examining the Idea of Developmental Stages

In common parlance, adolescence is so routinely treated as a clearly marked period of development that it is rarely remembered that when Hall (1904) launched the modern study of adolescence a century ago, he referred to an age period in the life cycle that spanned the ages from 14 to 25 years. At the present time, although it is common to encounter claims of a new period of life that spans all or part of the years that Hall identified as adolescence, there is widespread disagreement on whether those years mark a distinct period of development or a more or less protracted transition to adulthood, which has itself been subjected to extensive changes in definition and periodization in terms of chronological age (Johnson-Hanks, 2002). For many decades, scholarly interest in the time period identified by Hall as adolescence (a term which came into English from French and Latin, referring to " a youth between childhood and manhood " [sic] Oxford English Dictionary, Second Electronic Edition, 1989) has focused only on the earlier years in Hall's proposed age period, roughly from 13 to 18, so that " teenager " and " adolescent " became virtually synonymous terms. In 1970, Keniston claimed that new socioeconomic circumstances, at least for the educated elite in advanced industrialized countries, justified the addition of a " new " stage of development, " youth " (ages 18 to 25), between adolescence as it was then understood and adulthood (Keniston, 1970). A decade later the period now accepted as adolescence was further subdivided into early and late " sub-stages " with the inauguration of The Journal of Early Adolescence which focused on the age roughly from 12 to 14 on the grounds that its developmental processes were distinct from those of later adolescence. Later still, the period that Keniston identified as youth has been renamed " emerging adulthood, " defined by Arnett (1998, p. 312) as " a period of development bridging adolescence and young adulthood, during which young people are no longer adolescents but have not yet attained full adult status. " This specification is quite similar to the way that adolescence had been treated as a period bridging childhood and adulthood in earlier eras. Arnett attributed the emergence of this stage to political, economic, and social changes occurring primarily in societies which have undergone a change from industrial-to information-based economies, and characterized it as " the …