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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Debating emerging adulthood : stage or process / [edited by] Jeffrey J. Arnett… [et al.].
p. cm.
1. Adulthood–Psychologial aspects. 2. Maturation (Psychology) I. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen.
BF724.5.D43 2011
305.242–dc22
2010020139
ISBN: 978-0-19-975717-6

3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 Contents

Introduction

1. The Curtain Rises: A Brief Overview of the Book 3

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Leo B. Hendry, Marion Kloep, and
Jennifer L. Tanner

SECTION I: Arguments for a Stage

2. Presenting “Emerging Adulthood”: What Makes

It Developmentally Distinctive? 13
Jennifer L. Tanner and Jeffrey Jensen Arnett

3. Themes and Variations in Emerging Adulthood across

Social Classes 31
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Jennifer L. Tanner

SECTION II: Arguments for a Process

4. A Systemic Approach to the Transitions to Adulthood 53

Marion Kloep and Leo B. Hendry

5. Lifestyles in Emerging Adulthood: Who Needs

Stages Anyway? 77
Leo B. Hendry and Marion Kloep
vi contents

SECTION III: Rejoinders

6. Rejoinder to Chapters 2 and 3: Critical Comments on

Arnett’s and Tanner’s Approach 107
Marion Kloep and Leo B. Hendry

7. In Defense of Emerging Adulthood as a Life Stage: Rejoinder

to Kloep’s and Hendry’s Chapters 4 and 5 121
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Jennifer L. Tanner

Conclusion

8. Bringing Down the Curtain 135

Part I: Jeffrey Jensen Arnett: One Stage, Many Paths 135
Part II: Marion Kloep: What We Can Learn from Polar Bears:
Changing a Stage or Staging a Change? 139
Part III: Leo B. Hendry: “As John McEnroe Used to Say . . .” 141
Part IV: Jennifer L. Tanner: It’s Not about Winning, It’s How You
Play the Game 147

References 153
Index 175
Debating Emerging Adulthood
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1
The Curtain Rises: A Brief
Overview of the Book
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Leo B. Hendry, Marion Kloep,
and Jennifer L. Tanner

Prologue

“All the world’s a stage,” begins a famous monologue from

William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and when we go to the the-
atre to watch a play we are always struck by the way the stage is
illuminated to enhance the actors’ performances and heighten
the emotions of the audience. Furthermore, we note how every-
thing is focused on the stage.
But there are other ways of presenting a performance, and
stories and plays sometimes train the spotlight on the players
interacting with each other and perhaps confronting the audience
members either by their words and actions or by moving among
them—thereby eliminating the focus on the stage, and rather
placing the emphasis on the behaviors of the participants—“All
the men and women [are] players.”
This book has similar, contrasting qualities. By juxtaposing
two divergent developmental perspectives about transitions from
adolescence to adulthood in industrialized societies, the authors
invite readers to become a participating audience, and as they
make their way through the various chapters of the book and are
introduced to the different approaches, theories, and evidence, to
join in the playfully serious debate, make up their minds, and

3
4 the curtain rises

become a supporter of one approach or the other: but let no one decide too
quickly who are the heroes and who are the villains in the plot!

Changing Societies and the Transition to Adulthood

The lives of young people today have changed almost beyond recognition com-
pared to a half century ago. The age of entering marriage, which formerly was
the late teens or very early 20s, is now closer to age 30 in every industrialized
country (Douglass, 2005, 2007). The age of entering parenthood has risen
more or less parallel to the rise in the marriage age. Premarital sex, formerly
strictly prohibited, is now widely tolerated, and in North America and northern
Europe, cohabitation before marriage has become normative (Jensen, 2001;
Stanley, Rhoades, & Markman, 2006). Young women, formerly restricted
to future roles of wives and mothers without a need for education or career,
now exceed young men in educational attainment all around the world
(Coleman & Schofield, 2007; National Center for Education Statistics, 2009).
Postsecondary education and training have become more important than ever
before, as the economy has shifted from a manufacturing base to a focus on
information, technology, and services.
This book sets out to consider the new features of the transition to adult-
hood in light of these cultural, technological, and economic changes, which
represent crucial, dynamic frameworks within which young people face the
challenges and risks of striving to achieve adult status. The range of social
processes, such as the development of a “risk society” (Beck, 1992), “detradi-
tionalization” (Heelas, Lash, & Morris, 1996), and “individualization” (Beck,
1992; Furlong & Cartmel, 1997), has had a powerful impact on the meaning
and experiences of young peoples’ transitions to adulthood. Castells (1998), for
instance, observed that the contemporary contours of diffuse social, economic,
and cultural conditions present new challenges because people must lead their
lives without a “route map.” This sociocultural “release” means that young
people today are less able to refer to traditional ways of knowledge and experi-
ence, and less inclined to rely on the advisory competence of adults.
Modern society now offers young people at least the illusion of flexibility
and variety, including the belief that in social life “anything goes!”: to marry or
not marry, to live in a partnership with a same-sex or opposite-sex partner, to
have children as a teenager or late in midlife or not at all, to have a job first and
a higher education later or the other way round, or to alternate between both.
Almost all choices are reversible—partners, jobs, and dwelling places can be
left and replaced.
 the curtain rises 5

This destandardized life course has been created by a number of macroso-

cial factors, such as fluctuating and uncertain job markets, occupational
demands for higher qualifications, and changing social customs and practices.
Leisure time has also been affected by the same new technologies and global-
ization that have been transforming working life: yesterday computer games,
today social-networking websites and Twitter, tomorrow who knows? A greater
age span is involved in present-day youth scenes, gender and social class differ-
ences are more diffuse, and tastes and styles have fragmented. Young peoples’
tastes seem not to fall within neat gender, social class, or geographic boundar-
ies (e.g., Roberts & Parsell, 1994).
In this state of volatility, there are few, if any, normative shifts required on
the part of young people, though this is not restricted to young people alone.
Fauske (1996) noted, some time ago, that a kind of search for perpetual
youth became apparent, with adults behaving like young people: undergoing
cosmetic surgery, going back to college, falling in love with a new partner,
starting a new kind of job, having exciting leisure pursuits, and following
“youth” fashions. Thus, the distinction between youth status and adult status
started to become obscure several decades ago and has continued to fade
(Buchmann, 1989).

The Need for New Theories

Due to the increasing destandardization and impermanence of life course

paths, traditional theories of human development have become outdated. Take,
for example, Freud’s (1856–1939) and Piaget’s (1896–1980) seminal theories.
They do not even consider development beyond the teenage years, and many
modern textbooks still treat “developmental psychology” as being synonymous
with “Child Psychology.”
Although Erikson (1902–1994) and Havighurst (1900–1991) did extend
their theories of human development to encompass the whole of the life span,
the stages they described no longer reflect the real-life experiences of people
today. For instance, Havighurst regarded the period of adolescence, ending
around the age of 20, as the time for establishing one’s identity and resolving
the developmental tasks of choosing a career and gaining emotional indepen-
dence, whereas he considered age 35 as the approximate starting point for
midlife transitions. Given that many young people today wait until close to age
30 to marry and have their first child—it really is true that “30 is the new 20,”
as the popular phrase states––it seems obvious that these theories have become
obsolete, and that developmental psychology needs a new and different
6 the curtain rises

approach to be able to explain life span development in the modern world, with
its ever-changing shifts and cultural variations.
Furthermore, these global forces and societal influences may vary between
countries. Larson (2002) has indicated that there are many new “adolescences”
forming around the world, refracted through distinct circumstances and cul-
tural systems, and not a single global youth culture. In the early 1990s, for
instance, Kloep and Hendry (1997) described Albanian society in transition,
where young people admired Western lifestyles but did not have the means to
realize them.
For social scientists interested in the lives of young people, clearly the old
theories premised on an entry into stable gender-specific adult roles at about
age 20 are no longer adequate for the America and Europe and industrialized
Asia of the 21st century. There is a need to rethink and re-conceptualise devel-
opmental theories so that the profound changes of recent decades are taken
into account. But what should be the nature of this re-conceptualisation? This
question is at the heart of this book.

Two Theoretical Approaches

Arnett (2000, 2004, 2006a, 2007a, 2010) and Tanner (2006) have proposed
that the changes in the lives of young people can best be understood as entail-
ing the rise of a new life stage, which Arnett termed emerging adulthood. A half
century ago, young people made the transition from adolescence to young
adulthood in relatively short order at around age 20, when most entered the
roles most commonly associated with adulthood, mainly marriage, parenthood,
and (for young men) stable full-time work. Now, however, the decade from
the late teens to the late 20s has changed entirely. It is not a time of entering
marriage and parenthood, but a time for having romantic and sexual relation-
ships with a variety of partners, with some of those relationships including
cohabitation. It is not a time for entering stable full-time work, but a time of
continued education and training to meet the demands of the modern informa-
tion/technology/services economy, followed by a series of short-term jobs in
the pursuit of a job that will be optimally satisfying and fulfilling. The focus is
not on making commitments to others but on attaining self-sufficiency (Arnett,
1998). Only after self-sufficiency has been attained, and an extended period
of self-focused freedom has been experienced, do emerging adults feel ready to
become young adults and take on the full weight of adult responsibilities
(Douglass, 2005; Tanner, 2006).
To accommodate variations in development, Arnett (2006b, 2010) proposed
that there is not one emerging adulthood but many emerging adulthoods.
 the curtain rises 7

That is, emerging adults around the world share demographic similarities, in
that they wait until at least their late 20s to enter stable adult roles, and they
may share developmental similarities such as focusing on identity explorations.
However, their experiences are likely to vary by cultural context, educational
attainment, and social class. An important issue for the nascent and burgeon-
ing field of emerging adulthood studies is to explore and describe this variation
(Arnett, 2006b, 2007a).
One of the goals of the book is to debate the value of this term “emerging
adulthood.” Clearly many scholars have found it valuable, as in less than a
decade it has become used in hundreds of studies by scholars all over the
world (Seiffge-Krenke & Gelhaar, 2008), in fields as diverse as psychology, psy-
chiatry, anthropology, education, medicine, social work, theology, and law
(Arnett, 2007a).
Hendry and Kloep (2007a, 2007b) take a different view and argue that
stage theories have never been able to embrace (or explain) individual transi-
tions across the life course, because there have always been groups, and sub-
groups, that deviated considerably from the norms created by traditional
developmental psychologists. Hence, as there are no universal stages, stage
theories cannot be universal theories. If they are not universal theories, then, at
best, they are only partial theories, valid for small groups of people at certain
historical times within certain societies. It would also imply that we would need
a different stage theory for every culture and a new one for every historical
period (thus many theories would go out of fashion very quickly in times of
rapid social change). Alternatively, psychology could declare itself as a science
solely of Western, white, middle-class people, and treat all “outsiders” as devia-
tions from that norm (pretty much as it once did with regard to women); or it
could claim that there are different theories for different people dependent on
gender, education, social class, and culture.
Furthermore, according to Hendry and Kloep, using age and age stages to
explain human behavior is not very explanatory. The fact that many young
people delay the age of first marriage is not explained by the fact that they are
emerging adults. Hence, inventing a new stage and putting a fancy name to
it do not add more to our comprehension of human development than cate-
gorizing a group of people on the basis of their age and describing some
commonalities in their behaviour. For this reason, Hendry and Kloep argue
that psychological understanding would be more enhanced if we abolished
stage theories altogether and tried to find explanations of the processes and
mechanisms that govern human change at any age. They argue that it would be
more productive to substitute generalizing descriptions for generalizable
explanations, and will suggest some ways of doing this within their chapters in
this book.
8 the curtain rises

The Outline of the Book

With this book we have created the opportunity to debate our differences, with
Arnett and Tanner on one side and Hendry and Kloep on the other. We will
critically comment on each other’s views, disagree and put forward alternative
ideas, and perhaps even come to some common conclusions. In the course
of this debate we will each be utilizing research from the United States, Europe,
and further afield to support our arguments, so that the reader can be partici-
pant, adjudicator, and supporter of one team or the other, in this friendly,
if cutting, academic debate about an until recently neglected period of the
life span. A number of illustrative case studies are to be found in Chapters 3
and 5 to provide real life examples of the principles discussed.
The book sets out to describe and analyze the period of “emerging adult-
hood” (both sides have agreed to use “emerging adulthood” in the book to refer
generally to persons aged 18–29) not only in Western societies but also in other
cultures. The coverage of supporting evidence for the claims and counterclaims
in this book may be somewhat partial due to a dearth of existing research find-
ings about this part of the life course. Nevertheless, we will attempt to provide
as comprehensive a picture as possible to argue our separate and collective
viewpoints. In the course of the text we will describe the transition to adult-
hood, offer explanations of findings, critically comment on theoretical frame-
works and empirical studies, and, finally, attempt to come to some theoretical
agreement––or at least allow our play a dénouement before the final curtain.
Although all four authors knew what had been written in the first five
chapters, the rejoinder chapters (6 and 7) and the individual sections of the
conclusions (Chapter 8) were not been seen by the rival camp before they
were completed. In this way we hope to ensure a genuine debate throughout
the book. More specifically, the book is arranged in sections as follows.

Arguments for a Stage

Chapter 2. Presenting “Emerging Adulthood”: What Makes It Developmentally

Distinctive?
J. L. Tanner and J. J. Arnett
Chapter 3. Themes and Variations in Emerging Adulthood across Social Classes
J. J. Arnett and J. L. Tanner
 the curtain rises 9

Arguments for a Process

Chapter 4. A Systemic Approach to the Transitions to Adulthood

M. Kloep and L. B. Hendry
Chapter 5: Lifestyles in Emerging Adulthood: Who Needs Stages Anyway?
L. B. Hendry and M. Kloep

Rejoinders

Chapter 6. Rejoinder to Chapters 2 and 3: Critical Comments on Arnett’s and

Tanner’s Approach
M. Kloep and L. B. Hendry
Chapter 7. In Defense of Emerging Adulthood as a Life Stage: Rejoinder to Kloep’s
and Hendry’s Chapters 4 and 5
J. J. Arnett and J. L. Tanner

Conclusion

Chapter 8. Bringing Down the Curtain

J. J. Arnett, M. Kloep, L. B. Hendry, and J. L. Tanner
We invite the reader to join us and view our presentation of ideas, theories,
evidence, and counterevidence, at all times participating in, and assessing, the
different performances with reasonable objectivity even if remaining partisan,
and being critical, yet retaining a sense of humor and ultimately deciding
whether the stage deserves to be highlighted or the process emphasized.
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section 1

Arguments for a Stage

This page intentionally left blank
2
Presenting “Emerging
Adulthood”: What Makes It
Developmentally Distinctive?
Jennifer L. Tanner and Jeffrey Jensen Arnett

The theory of emerging adulthood identifies a new and distinct

period of the life course that has come to characterize the experi-
ences of 18- to 29-year-olds in industrialized societies over the
past half-century (Arnett, 2000). The shared experiences of young
people in their 20s took on new meaning for cohorts that came
of age in the 1980s and 1990s and afterward. In prior decades,
the 20s were relatively predictable: young people finished their
education, moved out of their parents’ household, got married,
and had their first children all in a short period of time, usually
by about age 25. The neat and expected sequencing of the age
period, however, has faded.
Prior to Arnett’s work identifying the life stage emerging adult-
hood and distinguishing it from both adolescence and young
adulthood, a variety of human development theories variously
accounted for these years. Erikson’s lifespan theory (1950) posited
adjoining stages, adolescence (stage 5) and young adulthood
(stage 6), during which young people encountered related tasks:
identity vs. identity confusion and intimacy vs. isolation, respectively.
In this framework, people between approximately ages 19 and 34
are universally oriented to the resolution of self in relation to
others (intimacy) and society (via work). Separate models accounted
for development that occurred in college students during these

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