10.  Emerging adults and their parents

Parents of emerging adults find the views and behaviour of their children more than a bit puzzling and quite different from their lives when they were growing up.  “Trying to understand our twenty-something son or daughter,” they might say, “is much like immigrating to a strange country.  We neither know our children’s language nor their customs.”[i]  On the surface there seems to be a disconnect between the previous generation and the current one.

Yet the relationship between today’s emerging adults and their parents is surprisingly close and relatively free from conflict.  There is much that these children admire about the life style of their parents, such as their work ethic and their willingness to sacrifice.  Their parents also continue to support them financially during their twenties, especially when they cannot fully pay their own way because they are still in school. 

At the same time many parents have concerns about their emerging adult children.   They want to know whether their children will adopt their values and their life style, accept their worldview, follow in their footsteps and especially when this is going to happen, if ever.  In view of the slow pace of emerging adulthood they are impatiently hoping for their sons or daughters to grow up soon and to become like them.  Beyond that, it is troubling for many parents to watch their children’s lives go in a direction that is quite different from their own.  However, it appears that most parents keep these worries to themselves and that they generally give their children a great deal of latitude in shaping their own destiny.

In assessing the validity of the concerns these parents have about their semi-adult children it should be borne in mind that descriptions by one generation of another generation are of necessity always self-involved.  The concerns parents have about their emerging adult children are not just based on an objective view of their children’s lives.  Those concerns are in part determined by the way these parents experience their own lives. 

As for the way today’s emerging adults view their parents, they may disagree with elements in their parents’ life style, but most of them see no need to openly voice their criticisms.  They are generally quite tolerant of the difference in outlook on life between them and their parents and they largely have chosen to just quietly go their own way.  All this entails, however, that there is very little dialogue between today’s emerging adults and their parents about life’s most fundamental issues and this in turn adds to the homelessness these twenty-something young people feel. 

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[i] To my knowledge, Margaret Mead in her book Culture and Commitment was the first to describe the generation gap as parents and their children living in different countries.  She ascribed this phenomenon to overly rapid historical-cultural change in our society.  This powerful metaphor is still relevant for describing the disconnect between today’s emerging adults and their parents.