Parenting Your Emerging Adult

by Varda Konstam

  The presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, candidates in the 2008 United States presidential election, in some ways exemplified this tension. Barack Obama boldly stated that “yes we can” hope and dream, while Hillary Clinton retorted that he was living in a “fairy tale.” The Clinton campaign’s model of adulthood implied giving up fairy tales and favoring practical realities. Many emerging adults (who voted overwhelmingly for President Obama) are reassessing but still believe in the dream.

  Another characteristic of adulthood is the ability to mold oneself to social expectations other than those of one’s family.17 This is a challenge given that children, adolescents and emerging adults in recent decades have been taught to value authenticity, the idea of being true and real to themselves. As they mature, they perceive that in many settings, such as the workplace, they are asked to be inauthentic. This creates inner conflict. Grappling with the issue of authenticity versus artificial role-playing means leaving an idealized world and coming to terms with what is. This is a developmental task that many emerging adults have a difficult time with, given the importance of authenticity in their lives. Learning how to assume social roles while retaining one’s authenticity seems to be an important hallmark of modern adulthood.

  The next section provides us with an opportunity to observe Caroline, an emerging adult, and her mother, Alicia Reardon, who help illustrate some of the tensions that can exist between emerging adults and their parents. These tensions are in part due to different world views regarding what an emerging adult is and is not.

  Caroline and Alicia Reardon

  Caroline and Alicia, a divorced single mother, find themselves arguing over who is in charge of Caroline’s life. Caroline is an articulate twenty-six-year-old who has recently moved out of her mother’s home. Caroline and her mother view the world very differently and have distinct ideas about how Caroline’s twenties should unfold. Both Caroline and her mother are entrenched in their respective positions. The tensions between them are substantial and are having a negative effect on other members of the family, a younger sister and brother.

  As you read these accounts, think about these questions: Can you empathize with Caroline’s perspective on adulthood or do you view her as coddled and entitled? If you were a friend of Alicia’s, how would you respond to the tensions she describes?

  Caroline’s Perspective

  My twenty-seventh birthday is a week away and I thought I would be an adult by now. I have a solid job. I’m in graduate school. I live on my own and I pay my own bills. When will it be enough for my mother to get off my back when I want to go on vacation? It’s my choice what I do with my vacation time and my earned money! I think that if I can pay my own bills with no issues, then I should be able to do what I want to do.

  I want to go to Iceland for a week with my friends. My mother is giving me a hard time about it and it is just not fair. When do I get to have fun again like when I was an undergraduate? I work a sixty-hour-a-week job and I’m barely getting enough sleep. If I want a week to chill, THEN I WILL.

  Every time I try to plan something just for me, my mother tells me I’m not acting like the adult I am. To that I say, if I am an adult then it shouldn’t matter what I do and she should lay off! I know she only says that kind of stuff because by my age she was married with kids and didn’t have the time or money to do anything. She worries about me spending my money frivolously, and I know that it is tied to her childhood and not having a lot of money. She worries about me getting into a bind and then what am I going to do? She thinks I’ll go straight to her and my father.

  She doesn’t know I’ve already bought the airplane tickets to Iceland with my student loan money. I’m going to tell her that I’m visiting a friend in San Francisco and my cell phone battery just happened to die on the trip.

  I am going to be twenty-seven years old and I’m still lying to my parent! When am I going to be an adult?

  Alicia’s Perspective

  I worry so much about Caroline. She doesn’t understand that bills do not just stop when you go on vacation. Employers don’t let you just leave for weeks at a time. She hasn’t lasted more than two years at a job. I’ve been at my job for twenty years! I just want her to put money in her account for a rainy day, so then maybe I can finally retire and stop bailing her out of her problems. She wanted to move out of the house on her own and didn’t have the collateral, so who gave her the money? I did.

  She needs to learn that being an adult is not just about making decisions. It is about making the right decisions; the right decisions for your family.

  That’s another thing. When is she going to settle down? She has to become an adult. What if she gets fired? What is she going to tell her landlord? “Sorry, sir, I went to Iceland and so I can’t pay my rent this month. Can I owe you the money?” She’ll end up back in my house and I just cannot let her fail like that. I think I need to keep pushing her to be more responsible. I’m not going to be here forever to bail her out. I worry so much about her. She just does not “get it.”

  Caroline and Alicia view Caroline’s life from different perspectives. Caroline is stuck in a rebellious, dependent and sometimes hostile stance. She disregards her mother’s appeals to act more responsibly. Caroline resents her mother’s judgments but does not seem to recognize that these judgments no longer have any real power in her adult life.

  Alicia is locked in a nagging pattern guided by the belief that she “cannot let Caroline fail.” It is difficult for her to relinquish control. This stance ensures continuing tensions between Alicia and her daughter. To complicate matters further, she is concerned that Caroline will mimic her father’s irresponsible money management behavior. Alicia is coming from a position of fear, which seldom produces positive change. She engages with Caroline in a self-defeating dance, leaving little space for the possibility for different dance steps to emerge.

  Who is in charge of Caroline and her life? What can Caroline do? What can Alicia do to improve their relationship? We will revisit the Reardons in chapter 9 and take a closer look at how they might change their “dance” to a new one.

  In this book I address key issues related to the developmental period of emerging adulthood. We will immerse ourselves in the experiences and diverse perspectives of emerging adults trying to negotiate environments characterized by complexity and uncertainty. After reviewing the opinions of other experts and their research, as well as my own research and clinical experiences, we’ll look at emerging adults and their parents trying to navigate the best they can with the tools they have. You will be asked to consider the complexity of the presenting issues and you will learn strategies and techniques for becoming more adept at identifying the relevant questions and proposing possible solutions.

  As you learn more about the theories and issues you will also become increasingly skillful at integrating the two and applying them to situations with your emerging adult. This book will not provide you with all the answers, but it will endeavor to give you a better understanding of the challenges emerging adults and their parents encounter and how better to navigate them. The challenges we will discuss are everyday challenges that fall within the norm. This book will not address emerging adult issues that are more serious in scope, such as intransigent emotional problems that require ongoing psychiatric intervention. In the process, I believe you will gain an increased understanding of the complex terrain people eighteen to twenty-nine years of age are navigating as well as increased appreciation and empathy for your emerging adult.

  Simplistic depictions of this generation of emerging adults are not, in my opinion, beneficial. This new generation defies easy characterizations. To dismiss them as immature and self-focused does not acknowledge the realities, costs and benefits associated with becoming an adult in the twenty-first century. Financially, for example, it is more difficult to strike out on one’s own. A minimum-wage or entry-level job doesn’t cover the expenses of independent living, especially when a you
ng man or woman must repay massive student loans.

  I feel we need to be more self-reflective before passing judgment on emerging adults or trying to shoehorn them into careers and lifestyles more typical of previous generations. Emerging adults have seen many of the mistakes their parents have made and are not eager to repeat them. They grew up in a world in which half of all marriages ended in divorce. They have watched many of their parents give their allegiance to sixty- or seventy-hour-a-week jobs, only to be “downsized” from their corporate offices. They have seen our planet’s resources diminish frighteningly as a consumer culture preached material success as the main criterion of a life well-lived. They don’t want to repeat their parents’ mistakes; they want to do better. They have to figure it out themselves.

  How can we do this? Where can we turn for answers? Bill O’Hanlon, a solution-focused therapist and prolific author, tells a funny story along these lines.18 An instructor, who is unmarried with no children, teaches a popular course titled “Ten Commandments for Parents.” He eventually meets the woman of his dreams, marries and has a child. After experiencing life as a parent, he re-titles his course: “Five Suggestions for Parents.” More time passes and he becomes the proud parent of a second child. He soon finds himself renaming the course again: “Three Tentative Hints for Parents.” After his third child, he stops teaching the class altogether.19

  In this book we will concentrate on understanding emerging adults and the issues that may surface for professionals working with them across diverse contexts. I hope to help you integrate what we know to date and discuss things I’ve learned from actively listening to a wide array of emerging adults, parents and employers—the major “stakeholders”—speak about this developmental period.

  Chapter 2

  EMERGING ADULTS AT WORK

  Coddled, self-indulgent and undisciplined? Or savvy, prudent, yet experimental? Characterizations of today’s emerging adults vary significantly. One popular view is that this generation is the most pampered in history, owing perhaps to the fact that their parents chose them more deliberately than any generation in the past. As a result, this generation of emerging adults has received too much attention. Another view portrays emerging adults as the screwed generation, having been utterly failed by a system that has not invested enough in their futures.1

  So which is it? Have we lavished too much attention on our children or not enough? Again, when speaking about a generation this wide and deep, competing views are bound to emerge. In my opinion, there is truth to both sides of the argument. And both sides offer insights into the way emerging adults are approaching the workplace today.

  This chapter focuses on the experiences of emerging adults at work, including their expectations and frustrations with the disconnect they are feeling in terms of what they thought the world of work would be like and what they are encountering.

  As parents, you are undoubtedly witnessing some of the struggles your children are facing. Many emerging adults feel burdened by the realization that it may be up to them to “clean up the mess” that previous generations have created. This is coloring the way they view career, work and social responsibility. They are wary. They don’t want to play the game the same way their parents played it. They are hesitant to buy into old rules. They do not plan to jump in with blinders on. They want to know what they are getting in return.

  There are other major factors at play. Much of the world has recently experienced an economic downturn of significant proportions. This, too, has had a dramatic impact on the lives of emerging adults trying to enter the job market and build their careers. Institutions are breaking down; the rules of business are changing faster; promises made to new generations are being broken.

  It is a confusing and disheartening picture.

  What do emerging adults have to say about their work lives? We’ll look at extensive interviews with emerging adults. We will listen to them speak about the challenges of today’s workplace. I will also offer comments and insights based on my research and experience with emerging adults. Throughout, I ask you to consider these questions: If you were an emerging adult during such changing and uncertain times, how would you chart your course? How would it be different from the course you navigated back in your twenties?

  Emerging adults today are getting on the career track more slowly and with more setbacks than previous generations did. It is easy to blame them and assume that since they are not “playing the game” the way past generations did, they are bringing their problems on themselves. But this, I think, is an unexamined view. The career world of today is vastly different from the world previous generations faced in their twenties. And yet schools, families and media pundits seem to be clinging to the old rules and expectations. No one has rewritten the handbook of working life to reflect today’s realities. Given that, how could emerging adults feel anything but confused? They are being told to do one thing, yet the world is rewarding something quite different.

  A New Orientation

  When we look at several factors—including the uncertain state of the economy and the changes in corporate America and other countries in recent decades—we can understand why the new generation may be frustrated and angry.

  However, it is important to note that although the terrain may be shifting, emerging adults overwhelmingly aspire toward traditional goals. They seem to want the same basic things their parents want for them: a satisfying career, marriage or a committed relationship and children. But they are trying to achieve these goals in their own way. This generation of emerging adults places emphasis on experimentation and personal choice. And why wouldn’t they? The old paradigms have collapsed. Let’s consider underlying principles and assumptions that fueled career decisions only a few decades ago:

  •Be loyal to the company and it will be loyal to you.

  •Work hard and you will be able to climb the corporate ladder, one rung at a time.

  •Put in your years faithfully and you can count on a secure retirement.

  •The economy will always be growing; there will always be good jobs for those who want them.

  •Do a good job and be conscientious; you will be rewarded with a stable career.

  •America is the world leader in most industries. Join an established American company and you cannot go wrong.

  •A good education is the key to a good career.

  •Certain careers, such as medicine, will always be stable and rewarding.

  •A good job comes with good benefits, such as health insurance.

  •Your pension will be there to support you when you retire.

  •Your income, prestige and buying power will increase the older you get and the longer you work.

  •If you are willing to trade off a little upper-end income potential, lifetime job security can be yours.

  All of these promises have been broken or disappeared, yet we don’t seem to have created any new and reliable promises to replace them. Given this, it makes perfect sense for emerging adults to be more experimental in their careers and to rely more on personal experience than on traditional corporate party lines. But because of this new orientation, it is taking the current generation quite a bit longer to put it all together.

  The economic downturn, coupled with the recent seismic changes in industry, is doing nothing to help. Current work conditions are causing a huge disconnect between the world many emerging adults envisioned as they were pursuing an education and the world they are encountering in reality. Their fundamental belief that one ought not to “settle” for a job that is less than what one truly desires is being challenged at its core. Tensions are abundant. This is not the career world for which emerging adults signed up!

  A large number of emerging adults remain committed to finding the “right” career and the “right” person, very frequently in that order. However, the economy is wreaking havoc with their plans. The rungs on the corporate ladder have either vanished or are being occupied by those ahead of them in the w
orkforce.2

  Emerging adults are having trouble attaining entry-level jobs because those are being held by people in their thirties. Thirty-somethings, who had expected to be in management by now, find higher career rungs blocked by older Gen Xers. And forty-somethings can no longer move into the executive ranks because those rungs are still inhabited by Boomers who were supposed to have retired by now! The corporate ladder, to the extent it even exists any longer, is jammed up.

  Due to a complex of reasons—among them slower maturation, longer educational paths, a clogged corporate ladder and a significant downturn in interdependent economies worldwide—many emerging adults are not moving rapidly into stable careers. On average, they are taking about five to ten years longer to cement their work and personal lives than the Boomer generation.3 This is particularly true of those who come from backgrounds of relative affluence.

  Understandably, this delay may be triggering concerns for you, the parent. Is this generation—and your son or daughter in particular—ever going to “settle down”? Remember, though, the encouraging news I shared in chapter 1: by approximately age thirty, most emerging adults do manage to establish careers.4 It is more a question of when than if, though it may not always seem that way to you.

  Shattered Expectations

  When you are dealing with your emerging adult on career issues, it is helpful to keep in mind the vast change in expectations with which emerging adults are grappling. Their loss of innocence as they enter the workforce is on a scale far greater than ever before.5