Parenting Your Emerging Adult

by Varda Konstam

  Ariely points out that at times it is best to close doors and stop obsessively weighing options:

  Running helter-skelter to keep doors from closing is a fool’s game…We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open. It’s just the way we’re wired. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to close them.19

  This experiment provides a graphic demonstration that people can sometimes keep options open for too long. For emphasis, Ariely offers a story inspired by the French philosopher Jean Buridan in which a hungry donkey stands in a barn with two identical haystacks trying to decide from which to eat. His indecision leads to his starvation.20

  Though it is “human nature” to protect our options, sometimes understanding that there is a concrete cost for keeping them open too long can be enough to help an emerging adult make a more timely decision.

  Solutions in the Model

  Understanding is the gift that Kelly and Lee’s model gives us. If we can better understand the reasons for emerging adults’ career indecisions, then the steps for solving the problem become easier to figure out. Not easy, but easier. If your emerging adult seems to be suffering from chronic indecision, think about him or her in relation to the five-part model. Which of the five causes seem most relevant in thinking about your son or daughter? Do more than one of them apply? There may be seeds of solutions in each of these five problems:

  •Lack of self-understanding (identity confusion). If your emerging adult seems to lack self-knowledge, that may be because she or he has been sheltered or overprotected. As a parent, you must force yourself to back off. Allow your emerging adult to make mistakes and grow from them. Encourage your son or daughter to get his or her own apartment, for example, or to carve out an adult life within your home. One of the best ways emerging adults get to know themselves is through making choices and living with the consequences.

  Perhaps your emerging adult would benefit from professional counseling. This can often provide a sense of purpose and self-understanding. Perhaps personality testing, administered by a career center, would help your emerging adult gain a better sense of his or her desires, traits and talents.

  New experience is also a powerful teacher about the self, especially if there is an element of risk involved. Anything that throws a person out of his or her comfort zone will increase self-knowledge dramatically. Perhaps a stint in the Peace Corps or the military, travel abroad or a summer spent hiking would help. These challenging environments facilitate the capacity to shift and learn new things about oneself. Self-understanding flows from being “tested.”

  •Lack of career information. If your emerging adult seems to be operating in an information vacuum (or overload, which comes down to the same thing), perhaps visiting a career counseling center will be helpful. Many cities and towns have centers that operate free of charge. As a general rule, encourage your emerging adult to gather career data from sources other than you. Your adult child may perceive information coming from you as thinly-disguised advice and may not receive it gratefully.

  Most high schools and colleges have job placement and/or career counseling offices that their graduates can use. Try to ascertain whether there is an inherent conflict of interest, as these career centers may be incentivized to propel their clients to pursue higher education degrees. It is a possibility but not certain.

  Look for career lectures and workshops in the hometown in which your son or daughter lives. Or, if your emerging adult is open to this, offer to spend one evening a week with him or her doing online career research. Make it a firm commitment.

  •Trait indecisiveness. Is your emerging adult habitually prone to indecision? Have you noticed this tendency most of his or her life? If your emerging adult has a habit of indecisiveness, what makes you think your emerging adult will suddenly become decisive when it comes to a career? It is overly optimistic to expect someone who has trouble deciding about trivial matters to be able to make decisions about something as complex and important as a career.

  One way to work with trait indecision is to look at what has worked for your child in the past. Presumably, your emerging adult has been able to make some good decisions. What was the catalyst or strategy for making a good decision in the past? Might a similar strategy be used now?

  Sometimes parental interventions can help. I spoke to a father, Patrick Owens, whose twenty-four-year old daughter Kaitlin had been floundering since college. He and his wife Denise didn’t think it was appropriate for them to be steering Kaitlin toward a career choice, so they tried a hands-off approach. Months of indecision turned into years, with no meaningful movement or experimentation on their daughter’s part.

  One day, while out walking, the parents came to an epiphany: “Kaitlin can’t decide what color socks to buy; what makes us think she is ever going to make a career decision?” The parents went home and started doing research. Knowing their daughter had a talent for storytelling and fantasy art as well as a passion for computer gaming, they found a master’s program in game design at a respected university. They presented their recommendation to their daughter. She seemed relieved to have the “decision” made for her and to have her parents’ support in pursuing her true passion. She dove into the application process. She is now happily enrolled in the program, doing well and feeling optimistic about her future.

  Is this a good strategy to use with most twenty-four-year-olds? No. But one works with the grain of one’s emerging adults (more about working with the grain in the concluding chapter). Recognizing their daughter’s chronic indecisiveness and inability to structure a path for herself, Patrick and Denise did what they felt was necessary to motivate Kaitlin to move forward in finding a career. In this case it seems to have worked.

  •Choice anxiety. If your emerging adult has been stymied into indecision by an overload of options, you might try to help her see the costs associated with keeping options open indefinitely. Point out that taking action toward a particular career will not lock her irreversibly onto that path. She can always change her mind later if it isn’t working. Help her to see that taking action is a tool for exploring options, rather than for closing them down. If she tries a certain vocation and hates it, that should not be seen as a mistake. Rather, she has gained valuable information that will steer her toward the right decision.

  •Disagreement with significant others. One of the reasons your emerging adult may not be making a decision is that you or someone else close to him or her has very different ideas for his or her career. Unable to resolve this dispute, your emerging adult lapses into indecision.

  Self-honesty on your part is required here. Are you, as a parent, trying to impose your career wishes on your emerging adult? Are you disapproving of his? You might be doing this in blatant or subtle ways. If so, you need to retract your opinions and do everything you can to show your emerging adult that you support him making his own decision. By owning his choice, he will feel increasingly confident about his choices and be able to accrue self-knowledge and good judgment in the process.

  Is someone else in your emerging adult’s life causing the disagreement? See if you can uncover that source of tension. Give your child strong support in choosing the career path he wants. In time, he will likely find the courage to make the choice.

  Your emerging adult may be making a conscious decision to pursue a non-challenging career path for the present—perhaps to save money or to work on another aspect of his life, such as relationships or creative pursuits. Or he wants to step back and gain life perspective. By engaging in honest discussions with him (and with yourself and your support system), you may be able to discover whether your emerging adult is using his present experiences in a positive, forward-looking way or is floundering.

  The career-related behaviors of emerging adults need to be viewed with a fresh perspective and parents must be careful not to rush to judgment or overprotect. Although some emerging adults seem to find a career identity effortlessly, many of them face a longer struggle, marked
by false starts and periods of seeming indecision. By understanding what may be affecting their decision process, with your new knowledge you can help your son or daughter over the hurdles rather than getting locked in conflict. My experience and research has led me to the realization that emerging adults want to move forward as much as you want it to happen. Believe it and offer them your steady support rather than disapproval.

  Chapter 4

  FROM THE PROFESSIONAL TO THE PERSONAL

  Much like the career landscape they are trying to navigate, the social and romantic lives of emerging adults tend to be fluid, uncertain and lacking in clear rules and expectations. The current generation of emerging adults finds itself tasked with a job for which it did not sign up: to create a new set of social and romantic rules and expectations that work in today’s world. Their parents tore down many existing structures, but some new structures have yet to take hold. These emerging adults grew up without a model for conducting relationships. The rules varied from household to household. If they didn’t grow up in a fractured household, their best friends or next-door neighbors most likely did.

  Where does that leave this generation of emerging adults? Just as many parents did not want to replicate the marriages that their parents had, this generation of emerging adults is committed to avoiding their parents’ mistakes. We cannot call what they are doing a revolution, because, in order to stage a revolution, one must have something firm from which to push off. We haven’t given today’s emerging adults a stable model against which to rebel. They don’t have a solid platform from which to spring. The strong bonds developed between this generation of parents and their emerging adults also don’t lend themselves to rebellion. It stands to reason that it is going to take them longer to sort things out.

  Many of the values parents have tried to teach their emerging adults have taken root; for example, equal sharing of responsibilities between partners, waiting for maturity before entering marriage and developing oneself as a complete person rather than seeking wholeness through a relationship. However, the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it” comes to mind. In a sense, emerging adults may have learned their lessons too well. They have taken the messages to heart in ways their parents did not necessarily intend. For example, some emerging adults I interviewed now place career ahead of relationships and marriage in terms of life importance and personal fulfillment. There has been a huge shift, especially for women, who have traditionally placed marriage and family far ahead of all other considerations.

  Many parents taught their emerging adults not to seek wholeness through relationships and now these young men and women seem to be seeking it through careers. Currently, we do not know the consequences of these actions. Existing structures have been torn down, but models that work in terms of building long-lasting, satisfying relationships in this era are sorely lacking. Will divorce rates, for example, decrease due to the increase in social and romantic experimentation among emerging adults? The answer to this question will be as complicated as the current social and romantic contexts our emerging adults are navigating.

  When it comes to the personal and romantic lives of emerging adults, impermanence and fluidity are the norm. Social codes of behavior have disappeared and there are no clear rules of engagement. Consider this: only a few decades ago, the great majority of women married by their early twenties, without cohabitating or having a premarital birth. By sharp contrast, less than 12 percent of women in the twenty-first century are following that path. This is a change far more sweeping than the revolution previous generations thought they were leading. Living together unmarried is now the most common social union for men and women under age twenty-four. Cohabitation has replaced marriage as the social norm.1

  Most emerging adults I interviewed believe that moving in together before marriage is a way of averting the possibility of divorce. However, this belief is not supported by research: couples who elect to cohabitate are actually more likely to become divorced. This reality cannot be attributed exclusively to individual factors such as religion, socioeconomic status, politics or education. The facts suggest a more complicated and nuanced picture. The timing of cohabitation and the meaning it holds for emerging adults who elect to cohabitate is key to understanding the relationship between cohabitation and divorce.2

  Couples who live together after becoming engaged are more committed and less inclined to divorce in comparison to those couples who elect to live together before marriage without the formality of engagement, a public declaration of one’s commitment to another. It is a more deliberate act and appears to arm both members of the couple to defend against inertia in terms of staying together despite difficulties in the relationship. Couples who cohabitate before marriage are “sliding, not deciding,” according to Drs. Scott M. Stanley, Galena Kline Rhoades and Howard J. Markman. It is thought that without the formality of a public declaration of commitment to each other, there is an increased possibility of sliding rather than actively deciding to marry, a dynamic that leaves the couple more vulnerable to divorce.3 While this interpretation is intriguing, further research is needed to corroborate these findings and explore alternative possibilities.

  It is important to realize that for today’s emerging adults, experimentation has a different meaning than it had for their parents. It is not necessarily a mark of youthful irresponsibility, as parents may tend to view it, but perhaps quite the opposite. When their parents experimented romantically, it was often a way of reveling in the newfound freedoms of the sexual revolution. In contrast, when emerging adults experiment, it may be a necessary path to self-discovery. Without a guidebook to steer them, they are forced to learn by trial and error.

  The economic uncertainty of recent times plus the mobility of modern society provide ample reasons why emerging adults are hesitant to rush into romantic commitments. But emerging adults still have relationship needs. How are they meeting those needs? Friendships seem to have taken center stage.

  Friendship: The New Marriage?

  In the past, most adults in their twenties sought fulfillment of their relationship needs primarily through romance and marriage. That has changed: In today’s highly mobile environment, friendships bring the meaning, balance and support that many emerging adults seek. Friendships have become an extended “family of choice” for emerging adults. They provide many of the social and emotional needs that romantic relationships and marriage once did.

  Colette, twenty-six years old and stressed due to grueling work hours, receives support from her group of friends. They help her cope with a high-stakes, treacherous work environment. Her friends provide her with a level of stimulation and entertainment that is a good fit, given her emotional and social needs at this point in her life. Unlike being in a romantic relationship, where she feels that she needs to be “on her game,” Colette values the lack of pressure she experiences with her friends. Even when with a romantic partner, Colette and her friends date in groups. She finds it more fun and less socially awkward in comparison to one-on-one dates.4

  Flexible Friendships

  Friendships are typically flexible among emerging adults. Paul, an emerging adult unsure of his future, suggests that friends provide a good alternative to long-term romantic commitments. Reliance on friends provides a simpler way of navigating when one’s life is still “in progress.”5 Fluidity, however, reigns, with friends weaving in and out of the circle depending on what is going on in their lives.

  Friendships evolve over the years. Some stand the test of time; others don’t. As emerging adults age, they value different qualities in their friends and many become more selective in their choices. Friendships are more likely to last if there is mutual commitment to a common purpose and values. Reciprocal support also cements the relationship. The possibility of a lasting friendship becomes more important as emerging adults mature. As emerging adults clarify their interests, values and goals, they seek deeper friendships with individuals who share their
priorities. The process, however, entails experimentation that often, at least initially, includes more superficial or weaker ties.

  One outcome hasn’t changed for this generation: Once married, with or without children, many emerging adults have trouble maintaining friendships. The demands of a family and career interfere with their ability to stay connected. Regrets about lost opportunities arise. However, with the advent of technologies such as text messaging, e-mail and social networking sites, emerging adults can reengage with one another with relative ease.

  Advances in technology allow friendship networks to persist and flourish, despite thousands of miles of separation. Friends can endure long periods without speaking face-to-face; they are able to keep up with each other’s lives through social media. Emerging adults are able to continue relationships seemingly as though their friends have never physically left. A sense of loyalty to their emerging adult friendship circles, in spite of going long periods without direct communication, sustains these valued relationships. If they do physically reconnect due to shifting and ever-changing circumstances, friends are able to pick up where they left off years ago without awkwardness.