4 - Emerging adulthood as a developmental stage

Summary

Introduction

This chapter will critically review the material of Arnett (2000) and others who have spearheaded the development of ‘emerging adulthood’ as a new developmental stage. Arnett argues that ‘emerging adults can pursue novel and intense experiences more freely than adolescents because they are less likely to be monitored by parents and can pursue them more freely than adults because they are less constrained by roles’ (2000, p 475).

A key feature of adolescence is taking risks. This is about trying new things, learning new skills, having new social and emotional experiences, and finding out more about who we are as we move into adulthood. Enabling young people to take risks safely is not a contradiction in terms. However, not all young people experience risk taking in the same way. Beckett and Lloyd (2022) highlight that adolescent behaviour and harmful experiences are often wrongly viewed by practitioners as ‘lifestyle choices’; this is underpinned by the idea that young people freely choose to engage in activities viewed as ‘risky’ and ‘harmful’. Often in these circumstances, practitioners and services treat adolescents as having the same agency as adults (Beckett et al 2017), not appreciating that they may be influenced inappropriately or incurring abuse or neglect. These contradictions and tensions will be explored in this chapter and their implications in relationship to Transitional Safeguarding are addressed. This includes providing examples of two different services that address these issues.

Human development and life course theory

Since the early twentieth century, social scientists have been interested in exploring and explaining the complexities of what it is that makes us human, including identifying commonalities in experience across cultures and societies. Humans are multifaceted complex beings. We are all individuals with idiosyncrasies living within a specific historic, social, and cultural context relative to us, and yet there are some commonalities of experience that all humans share across these contexts. Most health, education, and social care practitioners will be familiar with the key psychoanalytic theories that have shaped much of the thinking about development over the last 100 years: Freud's psychosexual development theory; Piaget's theory about cognitive development; Pavlov's behavioural theory; Skinner's theory of conditioning; Erikson's theory of psychosocial development; and Bowlby's theory of attachment.