Part VI: The Developing Person So Far: Emerging Adulthood

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Bodies are generally strong, healthy, and active. Well-functioning organ systems provide protection through homeostasis, allostasis, and organ reserve. Good health habits include improving nutrition, increasing exercise, and avoiding dangerous risks and addictive drugs. Unfortunately, many emerging adults struggle to maintain good habits. Death due to disease in emerging adulthood is rare.

Sexual and reproductive potential are at their peak. Emerging adults typically satisfy their strong sexual appetites with a series of relationships that may last months or years. Sexually transmitted infections are a particular risk for this age group.

Although most cope well with their new freedom, for some the stresses of this period make psychopathology more common, including major depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.

Risk-taking is common during emerging adulthood, with men more prone to taking risks than women. Some risk-taking is involved in developmental tasks such as leaving home or starting a new job. Some risks are beneficial, others are not.

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Emerging adults may reach a fifth stage of cognition, called postformal thought, characterized by practical, flexible, and dialectical reasoning.

Adults learn to balance emotions and logic, and the experiences of adulthood move individuals toward deeper reflection and moral analysis. Religious faith may become more mature.

Tertiary education aims to advance critical thinking as well as to develop communication and practical skills. Usually these goals are achieved. More and more emerging adults attend college, a trend particularly apparent among women (who traditionally achieved less education than men), members of minority groups, and in developing nations—especially in Asia and Africa. As a result, emerging adults everywhere are exposed to a wider range of ideas and values.

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Emerging adults continue on the path toward identity achievement, finding vocational and ethnic identity particularly difficult as economic pressures and ethnic diversity increase. Personality patterns, inherited or developed in childhood, become more stable—although change is possible at every stage.

Friendships become very important as a buffer against the stresses of emerging adulthood, and as a way to find romantic partners. Many emerging adults cohabit with a partner, with the intent of getting married someday (but not just yet). Relationship problems, including domestic violence, are more common in emerging adulthood than later on.

Families of origin continue to be supportive of their emerging-adult children, offering financial and emotional help and often providing a home as well. The impact of living with one’s parents depends not only on the habits and personality of the emerging adult, but also on cultural norms.