Is Emerging Adulthood a Stage?

The idea

Arnett proposed emerging adulthood as a new life stage between adolescence and young adulthood, roughly eighteen to twenty-five, marked by five features: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a sense of possibilities. The case for it rests on real change. Rising credential demands keep young people in school longer, and median ages of marriage and parenthood in industrialized countries now sit around thirty, leaving a decade that is neither adolescence nor settled adulthood. Arnett's own national data suggest the features appear across US social classes. The critics raise three questions. First, universality: emerging adulthood is found mainly in industrialized countries, and in non-industrialized countries only among the middle-class elite, so it describes a historical and economic circumstance more than a universal stage. Second, class: lower-income young people explore less, face short-term work and feel less optimistic, so the age of possibilities is not open to everyone equally. Third, culture: in Asian industrialized countries, self-focus is balanced by obligations to parents, and child marriage elsewhere removes the period entirely.