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Early Adulthood Research Paper

840 Words4 Pages

‘Life has many ways of testing a person’s will. Either by having nothing happen at all, or by having everything happen at once.’ Is QLC a Necessary Part of Evolution into Adulthood? As far back as the 1960s, renowned psychologist Erik Erikson proposed a psychosocial theory, known as theory of the lifespan which noted that a crisis occurs at the commencement of early adulthood. The crisis here is unique in the sense that it is termed to be a developmental crisis; characterized by the challenges of adult ‘intimacy’, i.e. difficulties with social embeddedness in relationships, roles and organizations (Erikson, 1980). Another researcher in the 70s, Lidz, building on Erikson’s model, observed that the absence of such embeddedness results in the …show more content…

Prior to this era, the legal age at which one attains adulthood justifies his/her involvement in such adult roles as marriage, parenthood and one or more full-time jobs. This cannot be juxtaposed to be so in this millennium, as by the age of 18, very few people are psychologically mature enough to handle the responsibilities of adulthood. Young people are often in a limbo, especially between the ages of 18-25 and having just entered the period of emerging adulthood, aren’t mature enough to be considered adults, fully. Usually, this gives rise to a visible lag between the attainment of adulthood and its full expression. In many ways, an emerging adult is similar to one in the period of early transition described by Levinson in 1986. Typically, as a person typically emerges from this transition period, he enters into early adulthood around the age of …show more content…

If the changes in one’s life structure comes too abruptly, this crisis is the resultant effect. As much as this period typically involves entering ‘social adulthood’ by way of becoming a vibrant part of the workforce as well as commencing parenting, it is indeed a period of critical decision making, one which defines the rest of that quarter lifer’s story. Though legally adults, the significant gap between the legality of adulthood and its functionality also poses a major challenge to the quarter lifer, and the result of this lag between legal and social adulthood is uncertainty about their status as adults, they know that they are potentially able to carry out some tasks and make some critical decisions, but really, can they? And as a researcher, Arnett rightly noted, there are frequent re-organizations of social groups, changes in residence and relationship status. As well, there is an unparalleled relationship between quarter life crisis and such risk-taking behavior as substance abuse, and

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