Young adults in the world have strayed from the traditional
process of transition in to adulthood and have rigorously changed their
lifestyle and behaviors. There are numerous macro-social factors
have altered the American life and have aided towards the transition trends
into adulthood.
The most prominent
factor affecting transition into adulthood is education, as it allows
individuals to mature with formal training and grooming. The GI Bill, aids to
this transformation within the economy through state subsidized state
universities and community colleges, allowing more young adults to enroll into
educational programs to become professional trained and groomed adults.
Remarkably, the government efforts to decrease the cost of education has
influenced many young adults to seek higher education and increase in the
number of graduates from high schools joining Universities and colleges rose to
25% in 2010.
Because of this, a greater percentage of youth are not quitting school
and getting stable jobs at the age of 18 years, though can extend their formal
education up to their 20s.
Another factor
altering the transition into adulthood among youth is the delay in
marriage. Many youth now wait until they are in their thirties to
bond in matrimony, regardless if they are men and women. They want to focus on
their careers, and establish themselves before they can settle down and have a
family. Between the year 1950 and 2006, the average age of a woman’s first
marriage went up from 20.3 years to 25.9 years of age. From their male counterparts,
it rose from 22.8 years to 27.5 years. The sharpest rise for both women and men
occurred in the late 90s to early 2000s. Traditionally, young adults settled
down earlier in their adult life, marrying in their early twenties because of
their limited focus on career and establishing purpose in life. They were
accustomed to entering into matrimony because it was expected of them from the
society. But today, a number of youth spend almost ten years between graduating
from high school and getting married, exploring the many options of life in unprecedented
freedom as singles.
The rapidly
changing environment that requires individuals to compete professionally and
socially has also led them to become more mature and independent then before,
allowing young adults to become more diligent in attaining education and
securing successful jobs. With a global recession still lingering on,
individuals are finding it difficult to secure their current jobs or finding
new ones, which is causing them to go back to school to gain professional
degrees to secure a stable professional position. Also, with the trending
competitive and highly paced environment, individuals are required to become
more independent, working hard towards achieving their personal and
professional goals that pushes them to become focused and hard working from an
early stage. All these factors are leading young adolescences to become
“adults” from an early stage, as they learn to take responsibilities for their
actions and achieving their objectives from an early stage in life. These factors influence the youth to extend
their education, delay their marriage plans, and possibly an overall
psychological course toward postponing commitments and maximizing options.
Furthermore, in
partial response to the above three factors, the parents of the modern youth,
very much aware of the what kind of resources one needs to succeed, appear
increasingly interested in extending financial and essential backing to their
children up to their twenties or probably early thirties. Going by the best
approximation, youth's parents spend in western countries about $38,340 on every child for material
assistance (housing, cash, food, educational expenses among others) and in eastern countries probably INR 500,000. These
resources assist to support financially the youth freedom to take a longer time
before they settle down for full adulthood (something that is culturally
determined by graduating from school, financial independence, stable job, and
marrying).
Moving
forward, in the 1960s several reliable technological forms of controlling birth
became easily available and was used by unmarried and married people alike. The
introduction and development of “the pill” was particularly significant.
Throughout history humans tried to check on their fertility through several
ways. But the last 50 years have experienced major transformations in the ease,
variety, accessibility and reliability of methods of birth control. As
illustrated in Inglehart, the cultural impact of this invention has been
to detach sexual intercourse from what God intended it for (procreation) in the
mentality of most Americans. Sexual intercourse progressively came to be
perceived as a casual element of any close or probably even a normal
relationship and did not have anything to do with having a child, serving for
most people, as some sort of recreational exercise. In the late 1980s, STDs
(Sexually Transmitted Diseases), for example herpes and AIDS became more
extensive concerns. However, these infections emphasized on sexual safety and
health, but not on the link between fertility and sex. The impact of extensive
use of birth control methods has also assisted to establish a culture of
“emerging adulthood” and far beyond.
Lastly, the period
between 1980s and 1990s witnessed the pervasive diffusion and powerful impact
of the theories of postmodernism and post-structuralism in the United States
culture. These started as mysterious scholarly theories among a group of French
professors of literature and linguistics, literary critics and academicians
drawn from the humanities. They soon spread quickly and were popularized in
social sciences and humanities in the world universities and colleges. Everything
which belonged to the “modern” was censured: certainty, epistemological
foundations, universalism, authorial voice, colonialism, the nation state,
reason, etc. Everything which was
perceived to be post-modern was rejoiced; fluidity, difference, uncertainty, multimodality,
changing identities, ambiguity, self construction, localism, audience reception
and many more. In reaching the American soil, postmodernism developed to a
simple-mind concept presuming the cultural construction of all things, soft
ontological antirealism, extreme moral relativism and individualistic
subjectivism. All these elements are very much witnessed within the culture of
emerging adults as suggested.
These 6
macro-social-cultural changes, alongside others, have aided to dramatically
transform the youth's life experience between the ages of eighteen and thirty.
Research studies concur that the transition to a mature adult today is more
disjointed, complex and very confusing compared to how it used to be in the
past decades according to Inglehart. The stages through education system,
first good job, marrying and parenthood are less coherent and organized
currently that they happened in the past. On the same point, today is marked
with unparallel freedom to learn experiment, roam, try again, and move on. What
has come out of this new phenomenon has been differently labeled as youthful
adolescence, extended adolescence, the 20 somethings and emerging adulthood. The
features indentifying this stage are instability, extreme identity exploration,
feelings of being in transition, in limbo, sense of opportunities,
possibilities and unparallel hope.
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