Parenting Your Emerging Adult

by Varda Konstam

  Family provides the anchor and launching pad for many emerging adults, a place from which to explore and navigate an increasingly complex, fluid and challenging global environment. If all you do as a parent is provide that sense of home base, you are giving your emerging adult a tremendous gift.

  Why Emerging Adults Need Strong Support

  In order to better understand why emerging adults need parents’ support, let’s take another look at the stresses they face. Emerging adults are coming into adulthood in a completely different context than their parents did. Today’s emerging adults grew up with vastly different messages and expectations; they are facing vastly different pressures. And since their parents’ generation fed them many of the precepts they’ve internalized and helped create many of the expectations they carry forth, their parents owe it to them to try to understand the realities they are facing as they move into adulthood.

  Emerging adults need to feel that they have something to look forward to. They also need to feel there is a relationship between what they do and what happens to them. Right now, for example, many emerging adults feel there is no relationship between performing well and finding and keeping their jobs. Workforces are now downsized for reasons that have little to do with job performance. Companies no longer feel a need to show loyalty to employees in return for dedication, hard work and creative contributions. Under such conditions, why should emerging adults show loyalty to their companies? Bosses are often frustrated by what they perceive as a “mercenary” attitude on the part of emerging adult employees. But perhaps that attitude is completely appropriate in a job market where caring for employees over the long term is no longer a concern of corporate culture.

  Many parents of emerging adults lived their work lives with a comforting sense of having two families—a job family and a home family. That is not an experience shared by emerging adults. And so, the support of the home family is needed more than ever before. It is important to show emerging adults how much parents value them and to offer them the emotional support that is lacking in the workforce. In a time of uncertainty, emerging adults want to be around people who care about them. They appreciate a sense of shared history.

  Emerging adults are desperately trying to mesh the optimistic beliefs their parents taught them with the harsh realities they are facing. This is hard work and they value the touchstone that parents can provide. Given that emerging adults are on their own without adequate social supports in place, they are seeking support where they know they will find it. Over 50 percent of emerging adults call their parents daily.14 Respond to the phone call or the text your son or daughter sends you; engage, offer words of encouragement in whatever communication style to which the two of you have become accustomed. This is not coddling in most cases. You serve a more vital role at this stage in your emerging adult’s life than your parents did for you, because there are fewer supports for today’s emerging adults. Conditions were already rough for emerging adults in the workforce and they have recently gotten worse. You can offer your emerging adult a sense of comfort and predictability to help offset feelings of hopelessness and despair.

  Neither Parents nor Children Can Go It Alone

  Emerging adults are being asked to go it alone emotionally, without adequate social support. They are in need of support structures but they may not even know it. Mentoring is in short supply, given that their supervisors frequently find themselves overextended; they are not incentivized for this critical responsibility. Emerging adults may blame themselves, because they are expected to manage all the contradictions on their own.

  Society needs to do a better job helping emerging adults make the transition to adulthood. Many emerging adults are dumped from the relatively safe harbor of high school or college into the working world with little realistic preparation. When their belief in unlimited choice smashes head-first into a world of limited opportunities (and the chasm is growing between those who are positioned to fare well in the marketplace and those who are not), many emerging adults are left reeling. High schools and colleges are not doing their fair share of analyzing the marketplace and helping emerging adults navigate their careers. In turn, emerging adults feel rudderless and disconnected and in that state they can make poor choices.

  The costs that go along with today’s individualistic, sink-or-swim culture are substantial. Eating disorders, substance abuse, clinical depression and anxiety are on the rise. This has been linked, in part, to the lack of structural supports emerging adults are encountering.15

  Many parents try to fix these problems, but they often require societal interventions as well. Judith Warner, a columnist for the New York Times and author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, notes that a tendency today is to “privatize” problems. Rather than focus on getting society to fix itself, people try to fix themselves individually. The underlying attitude of this approach is a sense of hopelessness. Perhaps people are giving up on the outside world, telling themselves that they’re the only ones on whom they can count. Disillusioned by the failure of society’s institutions—government, education, religion—to solve problems, individuals have decided that self-control is the only real power they have.16

  Unfortunately, economic hardships reinforce this point of view. Now people are also questioning once-dependable financial structures, such as the banking and insurance industries. On the plus side, society is at an important juncture where many of the old rules have broken down. People are questioning old assumptions. Opportunity and creativity can thrive in this environment. However, solutions need to be broader in scope and involve all the major stakeholders. A systemic approach is required. Society must make major adjustments and not leave all of the adjusting to the individual. Rather than condemning emerging adults for the choices they are making, parents and society need to examine the choices emerging adults are being offered and ask whether these choices are realistic, given the current social and economic environment.

  Society has to do its fair share to help and encourage emerging adults and their parents. We all need to offer one another support as individuals, but we also need to put political pressure where it belongs—on the societal structures that are currently malfunctioning.

  Tending to Your 40 Percent

  As Sonja Lyubormirsky suggests, resilient adults look for happiness “in the right places.”17 They wisely choose activities and attitudes that sustain their levels of happiness. In the process of trying to gain control of your own 40 percent, look at the next list of behaviors associated with resilience and ask yourself how many of these statements apply to you. Resilient individuals, those who look for happiness “in the right places,” exhibit many, if not all, of these:

  •They devote a great amount of time to their family and friends, nurturing and enjoying those relationships.

  •They are comfortable expressing gratitude for all they have.

  •They are often the first to offer helping hands to coworkers and passersby.

  •They practice optimism when imagining their futures.

  •They savor life’s pleasures and try to live in the present moment.

  •They make physical exercise a weekly or even daily habit.

  •They are deeply committed to lifelong goals and ambitions.18

  Design a plan for your life that includes looking for happiness “in the right places.” This does not have to be elaborate or complex. Which of the activities we’ve just listed are you most motivated to examine and change? Select that activity and do just one thing differently. After a while, do another.

  The great thing about this stage of parenthood is that you can stop parenting your child and start nurturing yourself. And as you do this, you give your emerging adult permission to do the same. You both will feel freer to be who you are.

  Going with the Grain

  Learn to go with the grain. This is a critical ingredient of good parenting, particularly as it relates to your emerging adult. It helps you focus on what is rathe
r than what is not. That approach allows the best of your emerging adult to unfold.

  What do I mean by going with the grain? To illustrate, I’ll ask you to try a simple exercise (though you may need to do it a few times to convince yourself). Lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. While making the circles, draw the number six in the air with your right hand. Notice what happened? Your foot changed direction.

  No matter how hard you try not to redirect your foot, you will probably not be successful. You will be going against the grain. You can think all you want about why your foot should go in the direction you want it to, but your foot will stubbornly insist upon going the way it is wired to.

  This lesson has important implications. A gifted artist who works with wood studies the wood and works to identify its natural grain, recognizing its inherent beauty. The artist works toward embellishing the best of what is already present. Going against the grain would destroy the wood and would result in an inferior sculpture.

  In your role as parent, it is your job to recognize the natural grain of your child. Promote and support your son’s or daughter’s natural tendencies, inclinations and strengths. Build on those strengths. Going counter to the grain only serves to destroy its natural beauty. Put your needs aside and try to see the beauty of the wood. Work with it. Appreciate it. You will feel happier and more in control of yourself and so will your emerging adult.

  Do you recall instances where you have gone against the grain when it comes to another person? What was the end result? We have all had multiple opportunities to learn this lesson, but some parents have difficulty applying it to their emerging adults. Parents feel it is their role to decide what emerging adults’ grain should be. Emerging adults are who they are and attempts to change them are as futile as trying to force your foot to go clockwise when it wants to go the other way.

  Think about your relationship with your spouse or significant other. When you first started your life together, you most likely tried to change him or her. Marianne Jaccobi, in a Boston Globe article titled “You, Only Different: Why do girlfriends and wives keep trying to change their men?”, ponders this process of trying to change “the other.” She states that in the past, “I’d overlook…shortfalls or assume he’d change—for the better, for me.” With age and maturity, she no longer assumes that this is the case. She observes that her friends who are in successful marriages have learned about what is possible to change and what is not. “These couples let go of trying to change each other…The little things…no longer seem to be a source of irritation. They’re little nuisances, endearing even, depending on the mood.”19 I am suggesting that the same is true for your relationship with your emerging adult.

  You have learned along the way what you can change in others and what you cannot. Apply these skills to your emerging adult. Stop trying to change who your emerging adult is and stop trying to go against the grain. If you are in doubt about whether you are doing this, ask trusted friends to take a look at the situation. They can often see it more clearly than you can.

  Perhaps what makes it particularly difficult when it comes to emerging adults is that they share some of their parents’ DNA. On an unspoken level, emerging adult children believe that they should respond to parents’ sculpting. Attempt to let go of the idea that just because you are the biological donor you are the designated sculptor of your child’s life. Try to go with the grain; when you do, you will find that you and your emerging adult will change each other without even realizing it. Change happens spontaneously when you give up the need to control your emerging adult and let him or her be.

  In Eastern society it has long been recognized that whatever one resists, persists; that which is pushed pushes back. So every time parents struggle with one of their children’s “negative” traits, they invite those children to dig in their heels and push back. Instead of changing, parents invite those traits to harden. However, if parents celebrate and engage their sons’ and daughters’ natural strengths, they invite those qualities to blossom. Accept that your emerging adult is not you. Your emerging adult has different talents. He or she will invite different life challenges and solve problems in different ways. Love and cherish that uniqueness; don’t try to stomp it out.

  Parenting has changed. You may feel it’s unfair that you are being asked to remain a parent longer than you “bargained for.” However, your child faces different challenges than you did. The time your emerging adult requires to leave the nest may not be the same as yours was. Remember that many in your generation took longer than your parents to launch, too, by adding four or more years of college. Your best approach is to do everything you can to encourage and support your emerging adult’s independence, but ease up on the pressure, the anger and the judgment. In that way, your emerging adult will move ahead at an organic speed and you will enjoy the time you have with him or her, even if it is longer than you were expecting.

  Each generation faces new challenges and learns new lessons that its parents’ generation did not. Choose optimism. Choose to believe that your emerging adult’s generation, in the end, is going to be wiser than yours. In the process, emerging adults will be accruing wisdom. They will have to earn that wisdom on their own, however. They can best do that with a lot of support and love from their families.

  Have faith in yourself and your emerging adult. Have faith your emerging adult will grow up and figure it out. It just might take longer than you expected!

  Notes

  Chapter 1:

  “I Child-Proofed My House, But They Still Get In”

  1.Jeffrey Arnett, “Suffering, Selfish, Slackers? Myths and Reality about Emerging Adults,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36, no. 1 (2007): 23–29.

  2.Jeffrey Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood: Understanding the New Way of Coming of Age,” in Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, eds. Jeffrey Arnett and Jennifer Lynn Tanner (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006), 1–3.

  3.Arnett, “Suffering, Selfish, Slackers?” 25.

  4.Jeffrey Arnett, “High Hopes in a Grim World: Emerging Adults’ Views of Their Futures and ‘Generation X,’ ” Youth & Society 31, no. 3 (2000): 283–285.

  5.Arnett, “Suffering, Selfish, Slackers?” 25.

  6.Ibid., 27.

  7.Ibid.

  8.Ibid., 28.

  9.Harry Blatterer, Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 88.

  10.Jeffrey Arnett, “Are College Students Adults? Their conceptions of the Transition to Adulthood,” Journal of Adult Development 1, no. 4 (1994) 213–224.

  11.Larry J. Nelson, Laura M. Padilla-Walker, Jason S. Carroll, Stephanie D. Madsen, Carolyn McNamara Barry and Sarah Badger, “If You Want Me to Treat You Like an Adult, Start Acting Like One!’ Comparing the Criteria That Emerging Adults and Their Parents Have for Adulthood,” Journal of Family Psychology 21, no. 4 (2007): 670–674.

  12.Jeffrey Arnett, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15.

  13.Jeffrey Arnett, “Learning to Stand Alone: The Contemporary American Transition to Adulthood in Cultural and Historical Context,” Human Development 41, no. 5–6 (1998): 295–315.

  14.Blatterer, Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty, 96.

  15.Ibid., 89–90.

  16.Ibid., 89–97.

  17.Ibid.

  18.Bill O’Hanlon and Pat Hudson, Love Is a Verb: How to Stop Analyzing Your Relationship and Start Making It Great! (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 155.

  19.Ibid.

  Chapter 2:

  Emerging Adults at Work

  1.Joel Kotkin, “Are Millennials the Screwed Generation?,” Newsweek (July 16, 2012, accessed February 2013) http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/15/are-millennials-the-screwed-generation.html.

  2.Political Calculations, “Are Baby Boomers Stealing Jobs from the Young?” TownhallFinance.com, May 12, 2012, accesse
d July 3, 2012, http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2012/05/12/are_baby_boomers_stealing_jobs_from_the_young_part_1.

  3.Jeffrey Arnett, “Suffering, Selfish, Slackers? Myths and Reality about Emerging Adults,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36, no. 1 (2007): 28.

  4.Ibid.

  5.Harry Blatterer, Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 89–97.

  6.Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled— and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York, NY: Free Press, 2006), 109.

  7.Dianne M. Durkin, The Loyalty Advantage: Essential Steps to Energize Your Company, Your Customers, Your Brand (New York: AMACOM, 2005), 34.

  8.Christine Hassler, 20-Something, 20-Everything: A Quarter-Life Woman’s Guide to Balance and Direction (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2005), 274–276; Christine Hassler, 20 Something Manifesto: Quarter-Lifers Speak Out About Who They Are, What They Want, and How to Get It (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 232.

  9.Hassler, 20-Something, 20-Everything, 275.

  10.Ibid., 273.

  11.Ibid., 272.

  12.Rich W. Feller, Stevie L. Honaker and Lynn M. Zagzebski, “Theoretical Voices Directing the Career Development Journey: Holland, Harris-Bowlsbey, and Krumboltz,” Career Development Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2001): 215.

  13.Varda Konstam and Ilana Lehmann, “Emerging Adults at Work and at Play: Leisure, Work Engagement, and Career Indecision,” Journal of Career Assessment 19, no. 2 (2011): 151–164.

  14.Merle Johnson, ed., More Maxims of Mark (New York: Privately published, 1927), 14.

  15.Jessica Godofsky, Cliff Zukin and Carl Van Horn, “Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy,” Worktrends: Americans’ Attitudes About Work, Employers, and Government, May 2011, accessed March 24, 2012, http://www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/content/Work_Trends_May_2011.pdf.