Early Adulthood: Self, Intimacy, and Work

This is Unit Twelve, part two, on family ties, paths through school and work, and love and family formation. Part one closed on what friends provide in early adulthood. Part two opens with friendship networks and family, then follows young adults through work, love and the start of families. Carry one question through this part: must a young adult know who she is before she can be close to someone else? Erikson said yes. At the entry that weighs identity and intimacy, the part sets out the critique of his answer, and what the evidence found. By the end you will be able to explain the family as a secure base. To describe a pessimistic explanatory style and locus of control. To state Erikson's sequence, Gilligan's critique, and the evidence. To name the three components of Sternberg's triangle. And to describe how young adults form families today.

Six entries on friends and family: networks, support, leaving home, staying close, and how parents fit.

Friendship networks, and difference.

HGD 1677 Friendship Networks and Difference

White and more-educated adults have larger friendship networks, and people of colour more often have kin-friends, relatives who are also close friends. Cross-race friendships take longer to deepen but broaden perspective and are more common among young adults, while lower-income students may feel like outsiders beside higher-income friends.

Family support in early adulthood.

HGD 1678 Family Support in Early Adulthood

In the United States, families are the main support for the transition to adulthood, giving on average about ten percent of their income to young adult children, while Sweden offers government programmes instead. Support framed as temporary is accepted without guilt, and young adults feel closest to grandparents who lived nearby.

Leaving home.

HGD 1679 Leaving Home

People in their twenties move most, and immigrant families in Canada differ in whether they expect children to leave for marriage, or for education and work; South Asian sons often stay in multigenerational homes after marriage. In the United States, living at home goes with lower income, savings and education, and is more common among men.

Staying close.

HGD 1680 Staying Close

Most young adults do not move far: about sixty percent live within ten miles of their childhood home, and about eighty percent within a hundred. Proximity increases contact and intergenerational solidarity: interaction, affection, shared values, mutual help and shared norms. Staying close is the norm for American young adults.

Parents after the move.

HGD 1681 Parents After the Move

US parents and children report less conflict after young adults move out, and most parents rate their relationships with young adult children as very good or excellent; young adults from immigrant families describe generational interdependence, help flowing in every direction. Money is the most common topic of disagreement.

Helicopter parenting.

HGD 1682 Helicopter Parenting

Controlling, or helicopter, parenting, like a parent emailing a professor about a twenty-year-old's grade, predicts anxiety and indecision in young adults, while many young adults describe a parent as a best friend. The family serves young adults best as a secure base, from unit four's attachment research: a safe place to return to while exploring.

Eight entries on paths through school and work, and on how young adults explain what happens to them.

What makes someone an adult.

HGD 1683 Trajectories and Markers of Adulthood

Young adults define adulthood by personal accountability, independent decisions and financial independence rather than by milestones such as marriage: a twenty-four-year-old who pays her own rent calls herself an adult, though unmarried. Trajectories are predicted pathways from behaviour in context, and the lengthened social clock allows many of them.

Pathways beyond college.

HGD 1684 Pathways Beyond College

About forty percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds are enrolled in college, so for more than half, college is not the path; they choose family, vocational training, full-time work, the military, volunteering or activism. Community service tends to decline after high school, while political engagement rises.

Rural, race and gender contexts.

HGD 1685 Rural, Race and Gender Contexts

Rural young adults face education deserts and less encouragement toward college, and those who stay home marry, work and parent earlier. Fewer men than women enrol in college across groups, such as forty percent of White men against fifty percent of White women, and Black young adults are more likely than White peers of similar income to finish college.

Disability, and the transition.

HGD 1686 Disability and the Transition

Young adults with disabilities meet barriers of pace, of complexity and literacy, and of stigma, including either–or thinking that treats independence as all or nothing. Individualized, holistic transition planning helps a young adult move from school to work and can counter that thinking.

Paths through college.

HGD 1687 College Pathways

One study identified rapid completers, about thirty-eight percent, who finished college by twenty-five, often from college-educated families, and marginal college-goers, about forty-three percent, of whom only six percent completed. Working more than twenty hours a week lowers grades and completion, while internships and study abroad predict higher earnings.

Career development.

HGD 1688 Career Development

Donald Super's life-span, life-space theory holds that career development runs from childhood, with exploration in adolescence and emerging adulthood and establishment in early and middle adulthood. Employers seek transferable skills, communication, problem-solving, collaboration and work ethic, and vocational identity exploration predicts motivation and performance.

How people explain what happens to them.

HGD 1689 Explanatory Style and Locus of Control

Attributional style, the course's third look at how people explain events, has two influential forms. Rotter's locus of control describes whether people see outcomes as caused by their own actions, an internal locus, or by luck, fate or others, an external locus. Explanatory style, from Peterson and Seligman, is the habitual way a person explains bad events; a pessimistic style explains them as internal, stable and global. Two graduates rejected for the same job: one thinks I'm unemployable and will never get anything; the other, that interview went badly. In a thirty-five-year study of Harvard graduates, a pessimistic style at twenty-five predicted poorer physical health from forty-five to sixty, even with earlier health controlled.

Work–life balance.

HGD 1690 Work–Life Balance

Work–life balance means spending the desired time on each valued activity, not equal time on all, and the balance tilts with need. College students spend about thirty hours a week on schoolwork, and young caregivers report moderate balance with signs of burnout. The course describes these findings without advising.

Six entries on identity and intimacy. The opening question is answered at the first of them.

The payoff: identity before intimacy?

HGD 1691 Identity Before Intimacy?

Erikson placed identity before intimacy: a young adult must first know who she is before fusing her identity with another's; in his words, the condition of twoness is that one must first become oneself. Carol Gilligan, in nineteen eighty-two, called this sequence gender-biased, arguing that women's development centres on relationships, so they might develop identity and intimacy together, or in reverse. The critique drew attention to relationships as a path of development. But longitudinal studies find that identity development predicts later intimacy and partnership quality for both sexes, even though women report more intimacy. That answers this part's question. What survives from the critique is broader: relationships are a developmental context in their own right, and a theory built mainly on men's lives needs checking against women's, the same pattern as Kohlberg in unit eight.

Intimacy, and adult attachment.

HGD 1692 Intimacy and Adult Attachment

Intimacy, in Sharabany's account, has eight dimensions, including frankness, sensitivity, exclusivity, giving and taking, shared activity, trust, loyalty and attachment. Secure adult attachment predicts conflict resolution, trust, closeness and satisfaction in couples, and Hazan and Shaver link these adult patterns to attachment styles first described in infancy.

Casual sex, and friends with benefits.

HGD 1693 Casual Sex and Friends With Benefits

Casual sex has declined: about twenty-two percent of women and twenty-four percent of men aged eighteen to twenty-three reported it in the past month, well below two thousand seven. In friends-with-benefits relationships, women more often expect change and men continuity; about fifteen percent become romantic, and most end entirely.

Singlehood.

HGD 1694 Singlehood

About half of young adults are single at any time, and partnered young adults report more life satisfaction, partly from meeting social-clock expectations, though singles satisfied with their status report well-being and self-esteem, and many are not interested in dating. The misconception is that being single in your twenties is a developmental failure.

Choosing partners.

HGD 1695 Choosing Partners

Homogamy is choosing partners similar to oneself, in education, values and background; the idea that opposites attract is unsupported. Men state more weight on looks, though stated ideals predict actual attraction poorly, and faithfulness, intelligence and humour top both sexes' lists. The misconception is that men and women want radically different partners.

Dating apps, and technology.

HGD 1696 Dating Apps and Technology

Slightly more than half of young adults have used dating apps, and about twenty percent of adults met a current partner online, far more among LGBTQ+ adults; many women report negative experiences on the apps. Technology supports connection but can also enable monitoring, control and stalking.

Four entries to close the unit, on love and on forming a family.

Sternberg's triangle of love.

HGD 1697 Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love

Robert Sternberg's triangular theory holds that love has three components. Intimacy is closeness, caring and emotional support. Passion is physiological and emotional arousal, including physical attraction. Commitment is the decision to maintain the relationship over time. Combinations produce different kinds of love: intimacy alone is liking; intimacy with commitment but little passion is companionate love, like a couple married thirty years, best friends though the early spark has faded; and all three together make consummate love. Exam items describe a relationship and ask for the components: attraction alone is infatuation, commitment alone is empty love.

Types of young adult relationship.

HGD 1698 Relationship Types in Young Adulthood

One study sorted young adult relationships into types: happily consolidated, about thirty-one percent; stuck, twenty-three percent, together through shared resources despite negative qualities; happily independent, twenty; and exploratory, eighteen. The least common type, high intensity and volatile, had the highest satisfaction and the highest depressive symptoms and heavy drinking.

Forming families.

HGD 1699 Forming Families

Young adults form families in varied orders. By the late twenties about a quarter of unmarried adults cohabit, and more young adults now live with a partner than with a spouse. Median age at first marriage is about twenty-eight for women and thirty for men, and mean age at first birth rose to about twenty-seven and a half in twenty twenty-three. A couple who cohabit for three years, marry at thirty and have a first child at thirty-two follow a now-common sequence. Same-sex and different-sex cohabiting couples are equally stable, rural young adults marry earlier, and about sixteen percent of young adults do not want or expect children.

The transition to parenthood.

HGD 1700 The Transition to Parenthood

The transition to parenthood tends to lower relationship satisfaction and raise conflict, and about half of young parents feel work–family stress, women more than men; new parents' self-esteem rises and falls with the day's relationship quality. The misconception is that having a baby brings a couple closer; satisfaction typically dips at first.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain the family as a secure base, and say that helicopter parenting predicts anxiety and indecision. You can describe a pessimistic explanatory style, internal, stable and global, and an internal or external locus of control. You can state Erikson's sequence, identity before intimacy, Gilligan's critique of it, and the evidence that identity predicts intimacy for both sexes. You can name Sternberg's three components, intimacy, passion and commitment, and the loves they make: liking, companionate, consummate. And you can describe family formation now: cohabitation first for many, marriage near thirty, and satisfaction that dips with a first child. Unit Thirteen turns to middle adulthood.