CHAPTER FIVE:
Emerging Adults and Post-Modernism
1. Distinguishing
the influence of development and of history in the lives of emerging adults
It is a longstanding
maxim in developmental psychology that you cannot adequately describe the lives
of a given generation without taking note of both the developmental and
historical factors influencing their lives.[i] A developmental approach classifies people
in terms of the age group to which they belong or in terms of the stage of life
in which they are living. School-aged children have experiences that
differ from those of middle-aged adults and therefore they behave
differently. The life experiences and
behaviour of teenagers is quite different from the experiences and behaviour of
seniors. In the developmental approach the criteria for distinguishing people
from one another are age and stage of life.
Historical factors
concern the reality that the experiences and behaviours of a group of people
are codetermined by the time in history in which they were born and raised.
People who were born and raised during the Great Depression have a
clearly discernable different lifestyle from those of the post-war boomers
because they grew up under different historical circumstances. The same can be said, of course, for all the
other cohorts variously labeled post-boomers, hippies, yuppies, generation X,
Y, Z and now the generation of emerging adults.
The fact that the current
generation of emerging adults can be defined as a cohort, i.e. as an age
group born and raised at the same time in history, is a reality very much worth
noting. If we were to describe them in purely developmental terms as some
commentators are doing, then their behaviour could be seen as an aberration of
normal adult behavior. Then parents and
other older adults could say: “They are just going through a phase, they are
taking their time at it but they will grow out of it when they hit thirty. Sooner or later they will act just like us.” However, if their behaviour is also
historically determined, then they may exhibit some of the behaviours peculiar
to their age group even after they have turned thirty.
[i] See, for example,
Kimmel, D.C. 1974 Adulthood and Aging. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p.26 ff.
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