Jeffrey Arnett on Helping Young People Navigate Emerging Adulthood

Lisa Lawson: Welcome to CaseyCast, the podcast of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. I'm Lisa Lawson, the Foundation's president and CEO. On this show, we explore how to build a brighter future for children, youth, and families.

I released a book called Thrive: How the Science of the Adolescent Brain Helps Us Imagine a Better Future for All Children. In it, I explore how young people ages 14 to 24 are navigating a dynamic period of development. The brain is changing, identities are forming and the path to independence looks very different than it did for previous generations. What strikes me most in this research is how much potential exists during these years and how much young people need our understanding and support as they figure out careers, relationships, where to live and who to become.

That's why I'm excited to talk today to Dr. Jeffrey Arnett. Dr. Arnett is a professor at Clark University and the psychologist who first coined the term emerging adulthood. His groundbreaking research focuses specifically on young people between 18 and 29. He's the author of several influential books, including Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from Late Teens Through the Twenties. Most importantly, he's a passionate advocate for seeing this stage of life not as a problem to be solved, but there's a journey worth understanding.

Jeffrey, welcome to CaseyCast. 

Jeffrey Arnett: Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Lawson: Well, let's start with the basics. What is emerging adulthood and why did you feel this age group needed its own name and its attention? How does it relate to adolescence? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Emerging adulthood is a new life stage lasting from age 18 to about age 29, and it's developed over the last 50 or 60 years due to a lot of changes that I'm sure we'll talk about during this podcast. I felt it was necessary because that age period had changed so much when I  first began studying it, even 30 years ago. It had changed a lot.

People were marrying later, having their first child later. They were moving home after moving out more often than they had before. They were taking longer to find stable work.

And so I felt that young adulthood was inadequate as a term for people 18 to 45.

I don't think that ever made sense, honestly. But by the time I began studying them in the 1990s, it made no sense at all. And I didn't think they were late adolescents either, for reasons that, again, I think we'll talk about here.

So I felt we needed a new term to recognize the distinctiveness of this age period and how it's different from the adolescence that precedes it and also from the more established adulthood that follows.

Lisa Lawson: So connected to adolescence, I've been talking to guests a bit about adolescence and what happens during that period of development. Connect adolescence and what happens then to emerging adulthood. 

Jeffrey Arnett: Sure, I'll be glad to do that. When I first began studying this age period, there were a lot of people who were calling them late adolescents because they had not yet reached a stable adulthood.

So in that view, they were still adolescents, but that never really made sense to me. And if you think about it, Lisa, it doesn't make sense. Adolescence, the distinctive thing about it is that you're going through puberty, and that's how we've usually framed the period of adolescence from the time puberty begins until the time you reach full physical and sexual maturity. But they're different than emerging adults in a lot of ways.

Besides going through puberty, they're also in secondary school. They're minors under the law. Almost all of them would live with their parents. And in all those ways, though, that doesn't apply to people who are 18 to 29.

So I thought that calling them late adolescents really didn't do justice to their distinctiveness and how they're different from adolescents. 

Lisa Lawson: Well, I know, um, we talk about adolescence as lasting until the mid-20s.

So beyond that sexual maturity, there's the cognitive and emotional and social development that's happening during those later stages of adolescence.

Tell me what you think has changed for young people over the last 30 years that might extend not just the maturity, but maybe the experiences that they have that distinguish full adulthood from where they are. What's changing? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Well, again, I don't think they're adolescents.

You know, I can see the temptation to apply that to them because it's true, there's still a lot of cognitive development going on, a lot of emotional development.

A lot of developing skills in relationships and in friendships and their relationships with their parents are changing. But I personally don't think adolescence is an accurate term for it. That's why I developed the term emerging adulthood, because even though, yes, they're not fully mature yet, they're not fully adult, they're not adolescents anymore. Their maturity is much greater than adolescence.

And I was struck by that because I had been studying adolescents before I studied emerging adults. And I was really struck by how much more mature emerging adults were by the time they reached their 20s. They just had insights into themselves and others that adolescents rarely have. And not just the college-educated ones.

I actually learned more from the people who had not gone to college after high school and had had, in, in some cases, a pretty rough life. I interviewed people who had been in prison, people who had had a child, young women who had had a child at a very early age and had to deal with early single motherhood. I interviewed people who had dropped out of high school.

So it's not just the college educated this applies to.

I found that regardless of their educational status and educational background, they're really different from adolescents.

Lisa Lawson: So you have described this time as one of exploration and possibility, but also uncertainty. What kinds of pressures are today's young people navigating that previous generations didn't face in quite the same way?

Jeffrey Arnett: I think a big thing that they're having to navigate, Lisa, is their greater freedom than previous generations.

You have to form your own identity, and that is challenging. It's a lot easier in some ways when somebody just tells you, okay, you're going to be a wife and mother, and tells the young man, you're going to work in the coal mine, or you're going to work on the automobile assembly line. That's not fun necessarily—

Lisa Lawson: But it's clear. It's clear.

Jeffrey Arnett: — but you know your place in life.

And now we have so much more freedom, but there's a lot of anxiety and uncertainty that goes along with it, inevitably. 

Lisa Lawson: Right. Yes.

One of the things we think a lot about at the Foundation is navigation, and you perfectly described why that's so important. Who helps young people sort through the maze of opportunities? Even what seems like a simple next step like college. Anyone applying to college now knows it is a maze of confusion, between where do you apply and what majors do you choose and how do you finance it and how do you choose classes and how do you get there.

That one simple, one path is riddled with confusion. Say a bit more about navigation and who might we look to help young people navigate this new maze of opportunities in their lives? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Well, I like that word navigation. I haven't used it a lot, although, as you noted, the subtitle of my book is The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, so maybe I should have. But I like that because you're having to find your way through a landscape that is complicated and might have dead ends and might have threats and dangers along the way, as well as opportunities. And you also have to figure out what the destination is that you're navigating toward, right?

And that's in many ways the hardest part of it.

You know, we throw people out there at the age of 18. They're done with secondary school.

Now we say, okay, now decide the path of your life.

Now decide how you're going to navigate forward.

But that's a lot to ask of an 18-year-old or a 19-year-old or often even a 22- or 23-year-old.

And so it's a real challenge because they don't yet have a clearly defined identity. Most of them, they're still exploring. And yet when you decide on a college and when you decide on a college major, or you decide to go to vocational school. you decide a professional track. You have to know to some extent who you are to know what's going to work best for you, right? You have to know what you want and what you're good at. 

Lisa Lawson: Right.

Jeffrey Arnett: And who knows that at 18? I don't know about you, but I didn't. 

Lisa Lawson: Right. 

Jeffrey Arnett: We're a little out of sync there in terms of what we're expecting people to decide and how ready they are to decide those things.

Lisa Lawson: Yeah. And I think they get paralyzed a lot of times because the road isn't straight. It's winding and it changes. You know, you think about something like the advent of AI. How would a young person four years ago have known what do I major in, not knowing how AI in the future will shape the job landscape or opportunities in the future.

So this issue of navigation is one that I think is critically important for young people. And they've got to navigate not just from that 18-year-old point, but in an ongoing way, which maybe leads me to this perhaps paralysis many young people might feel. I hear a lot of frustration from parents and employers about young adults who seem to be struggling to launch.

What do you think adults misunderstand about what these young people are experiencing and what this generation is up against? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Well, I think that struggle to launch, I think the heart of that, Lisa, is these identity issues. They're struggling to launch because they don't know what path they want to navigate forward. They don't know themselves well enough to know that.

Here's a statistic that I think illustrates that very well.

You know, over half of young Americans now enter a four-year school after graduating from high school. Well, that's great in many ways because that's our economy today, right? It's a knowledge economy.

You have to know something beyond secondary school. 

Lisa Lawson: Right. 

Jeffrey Arnett: But almost half of the people who enter a four-year college have still not graduated six years later. 

Lisa Lawson: Right.

Jeffrey Arnett: That's a national statistic. And it really might shock a lot of people who hear it, I think. But what that tells me is that they shouldn't have gone when they didn't know what they wanted to do. There's a pressure to go because what else are you going to do?

You're going to work at the checkout counter in the grocery store? I mean, that's, that's respectable enough, but there are not a lot of job options when you're 18 and don't have much education.

So what are you going to do? And they don't know what else to do, so they go to college, but they don't know what they're doing there.

You know, one great resource, Lisa, is community colleges, two-year schools. It's a great American institution. And you can explore that way.

You can take a course in this or that. You might have 10 ideas about different goals you might navigate yourself toward.

And now you can take 10 different classes. It's not going cost you that much money.

And often those teachers are terrific. They're people who are sometimes full-time faculty, but more often they're people who just love the idea to help people. And they know a lot.

And so you can find a course that's something you think you might want to do and take that and get to know that instructor, that professor, get some more information about what it would be like to do that for a career. 

Lisa Lawson: I think that's a great suggestion. And we certainly know that community colleges are an incredibly important resource, both for young people who are starting out, but those who might want to pivot in their middle 20s and learn that there's something else that they are interested in. 

So I think that's a, a wonderful suggestion, and as you said, a typically lower-cost college option, and they could go part-time and also work at the same time.

So I think that's great. From your research, do you have ideas of other kinds of supports that would help young people move forward, especially those who might not have a family safety net? What does, what does good support for young people in emerging adulthood look like?

And who's providing it maybe beyond just their families? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Well, I think we need to do a lot better as a society in providing the next level of education and training beyond secondary school.

You know, it took centuries actually for primary school even to be established. You go back two centuries ago, which is a relatively short time historically, most people were illiterate.

Because there was no established primary school system.

So no, most people went to school little or not at all, and they just started working on a farm. And that's what most people did at that time, or they worked in a shop that their parents had started or their grandparents.

And so we gradually established a primary school system because we realized, you know, we're going to be a lot better off as a society and as an economy if people can read and write and do arithmetic.

So we established primary school. Gradually we learned that, you know, you need more than that. As the economy moved into the 20th century, it was getting more complex. Agricultural jobs were disappearing and people needed to know more for the modern industrial economy.

So we added secondary school. But if you go back even to 1900, most people did not even go to high school, Lisa.

So, but eventually we, we established that as a society. We said, okay, everybody needs secondary school, too.

Well, now we need to say everybody needs tertiary education. That doesn't mean everybody needs a four-year degree. That means everybody needs to know something that other people don't know. They need skills and they need knowledge to participate in the modern economy.

I think that's coming, but I think it's just like primary and secondary education. It takes a while for us to recognize that and for that to be institutionalized. 

Lisa Lawson: Well, I think that's great. Well, you, you have studied emerging adulthood around the world.

What do you see in other countries that might help us reimagine how we support this stage of life here in the United States? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Well, I mentioned the European gap year.

You know, my wife is Danish, so I spent quite a lot of time in Europe and I lived in Denmark for a year. I had a Fulbright there and learned a lot about Danish society and European societies.

I spend a lot of time in Europe now, and they have an excellent educational system, including at the tertiary level. People in Europe, nobody goes into $50,000, $70,000, $100,000 debt to go to college. Nobody. Because the state provides tertiary education.

You have a lot of options.

And so you can get professional training in something very practical, or you can go to university, but most people don't do that. They just— you can go to business school, learn how to be an accountant, learn how to be an actuary, learn how to be a notary. Learn how to go into the insurance business.

You know, there are a lot of things you can do that are practical skills, and, and they've established that much better than we have.

So that's one thing I've learned.

I've also done a lot of research in countries like China, India, several countries in Africa. I just finished producing a film on 18-year-olds in Namibia, which is a country in Southern Africa.

And it was just delightful to meet these young people and to hear their views on things. And one thing that I really learned from it was just how strong their sense of family obligation is.

You know, we think of emerging adulthood, your 20s, as the time you really become independent from your parents. Well, that's, that's good in many ways. But in Namibia, they have their personal dreams and goals too.

But they're also very conscious of their obligations to their families, to the younger siblings, their grandparents, their parents.

And so to me, it's always interesting to see different cultural ways of being and value it and, and comparing it to how we live and what we value. I think we can always learn from, from knowing more about different ways to do things. 

Lisa Lawson: That's great.

Do you see any interest in other pathways more strongly than you see them here in the United States? When I talk to young people, they talk to me a lot about wanting to be entrepreneurs.

I'm sort of curious if you have a sense of that entrepreneurial spirit, maybe in Namibia or other places that you've talked to young people. 

Jeffrey Arnett: Yeah, I do see that.

I've seen that in my Namibia documentary. I see it in France where I also spend a lot of time. There are a lot of small businesses here in France, especially in Paris where I mostly spend time. And it's really a city of small businesses.

You know, there are a ton of little bakeries and little restaurants, little shops, little art galleries. It's very entrepreneurial. But I will caution that it's hard to make those things work. 

Lisa Lawson: It is.

Jeffrey Arnett: You know, you gotta be really motivated. Right across from the apartment where we stay in Paris is the baker. And on the second floor, the baker, every day beginning about 4 or 5 PM, you can see the bakers in there on the second floor starting to make things for tomorrow. And they're there for a long time.

We go to bed, they're making all the things for tomorrow, and then it's time to get up and sell everything that you made. And, the restaurants, of course, are notoriously hard to make work, and the failure rate is high. It's a great dream, and if you can make it work, more power to you. But young people should not be deceived about just how hard it is to make a business work.

I think it's probably better at 18 or 20 or 20, even 25, to get a job in a business you think you might want to start yourself and learn what's involved in it.

You know, get some, some personal training and experience in it before you launching yourself. Venture out on your own. Yeah, yeah.

Lisa Lawson: I'm just always inspired, you know. That is the one of the sources of, of our strength as a country is our entrepreneurial spirit. And to see that so strongly reflected in young people and their dreams. I know we certainly don't want them to get out and put their personal financial future at risk, but there are in this economy, you know, you wait new ways through gig work and other kinds of contracting experiences, etc, ways that young people can start to, even as creatives, you know, start to build their own brand and enterprise. And, and I'm always just inspired and, and was curious what you think we might do to support young people in those dreams.

And I think your, your notion of shadowing or working in those businesses, and even as I mentioned, apprenticeships are ways that, that can really help that. I want to pivot to sort of the the people around young people and the relationships that they have in their lives. And I'd love to hear you talk about how important relationships are in helping young people navigate emerging adulthood, whether it's their parents or mentors or peers. What roles do relationships play in successfully navigating this period?

Jeffrey Arnett: Yeah, I think mentors are great if you can find them. At this stage in my career, I'm serving as a mentor to a lot of young scholars in emerging adulthood. In fact, I just had a Zoom call a couple of hours ago with a young man I'm mentoring, and he's trying to decide about what PhD program to go in. And I'm delighted to do it.

But I think you're lucky if you can find that, and you have to take initiative. You have to really try to find somebody, ask people. You might get turned down, but ask more than one person until you find the right match. You have to be proactive in that because it can be really important.

Even if your parents are very supportive, it's unlikely that you're going to go into the same field as them.

And so it can be really important if you can find a person who's in the field you think you want to go in and who will take a personal interest in you. And don't be afraid to ask.

Most of us who are more senior in our careers, we take a lot of satisfaction in helping young people. And you can't find out unless you ask.

Lisa Lawson: That's true. Yeah.

I met one of the most important mentors in my career when I was— after my first year of law school, I just cold-called her and said I admired her career and wondered if she'd befriend me. And we're still friends today. And she's my daughter's godmother and all from a cold call.

So you're right, people enjoy helping those who are trying to chart a path behind them.

So I think that's a great suggestion to focus on young people building mentors. Before we close, I want to ask if there's a story, maybe from your research or your students, that captures what's possible when a young person gets the right support during emerging adulthood.

Let's talk about what can go right.

We have explored what might not go so well. What happens when it all comes together? 

Jeffrey Arnett: Yeah, that's a really great question. And this has been a fascinating part about studying emerging adulthood for me.

It really is a time of extraordinary resilience. That's the term we use in psychology. We talk about resilience, people who've had really tough, difficult, painful experiences and have nevertheless managed to function well. And I've seen that a lot among emerging adults.

And I really think the reason, Lisa, is simply that they can leave home.

You know, when you're five years old and your parents are neglectful or abusive or they're fighting all the time, or you're 15 years old or even 16 or 17, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't leave. You're still a minor under the law and you're still economically dependent.

But you get to your 20s and now you can leave. And that simple fact alone can be magic. You take yourself out of a pathological family environment and sometimes they absolutely bounce back in some amazing ways. I'll give you one example of a woman I interviewed who talked about both the physical and emotional abuse that she had had in childhood and how she felt like her parents just hated her and hated each other.

And that family environment was really hell. And then when she was in her late teens, she found a church group and she discovered that she loved being there because it was so different than the family household she'd grown up with. And she did find mentors there. She found people who really cared about her, even though they weren't biologically related to her.

And now when I interviewed her at the age of, I think she was 23, she had gotten a college education against all odds, and now she was working and paying for her own apartment and psychologically healthy in spite of all the odds against her. And it was a really touching story of how people really can bounce back once they get out of a pathological family situation. 

Lisa Lawson: Mm. That's a great story and really speaks to the window of opportunity that this age period provides for healing and for creating an identity for yourself outside of your family and for learning how to build strong relationships with positive people in your life.

I think that is really the possibility we're always trying to create  for young people, and it's wonderful to hear that she found a way to build the kind of life she wanted to in her future. Well, I hate to tell you this, but we're at our last question. You've got three minutes with a room full of educators, employers and policymakers. What's the one thing you want them to understand about emerging adulthood?

Jeffrey Arnett: I want them to understand that this is probably the most important decade of life. If you think about it, that's when people are making all the big decisions that are likely to set the foundation of their adult lives for decades to come. Your choice about education or training, your choices about where to live, your choices about finding a partner, about deciding whether or not to have children, whether you have them in your 20s or your 30s.

Those are all huge decisions, right, that we play out in the decades to come.

And so I think we need to recognize both the tremendous potential of that decade as well as the tremendous vulnerability. There are a lot of mental health issues in that decade, and a lot of it has to do with having trouble navigating a way through all those decisions. And not having enough support, not finding a mentor, as you said, or not finding that support from your parents or anybody else in your family.

So I think as a society, we need to recognize both the vulnerability and the potential, and we need to make more of an investment in them. Better support for education and training after high school. Nobody should be going tens of thousands of dollars into debt to prepare themselves for adult work. That is wrong.

We need to ameliorate that. It's in our interest as a society to provide that support so that people will be successful in their adult lives and will be able to contribute all they can from their own unique talents. And we haven't yet grasped that, I think, because we haven't fully recognized that this is a new life stage. And it's here to stay.

We're not going from adolescence to a settled adulthood by the age of 20 or 21 anymore, and we're never going to do that again.

So we need to really provide more resources as a society to help them succeed, because when they succeed, we all succeed. They're the adults that are going to be leading our society in the future. 

Lisa Lawson: I couldn't have said that better myself.

Thank you so much for that powerful call to action to all of us, and thank you Thank you so much, Dr. Arnett, for joining us today. 

Jeffrey Arnett: You're welcome, Lisa, my pleasure. 

Lisa Lawson And thanks to all of our listeners for joining us on CaseyCast. For listeners who want to dive deeper, you can find show notes at aecf.org/podcast.

And if you'd like to learn more about my book, Thrive: How the Science of the Adolescent Brain Helps Us Imagine a Better Future for All Children, you can find it at aecf.org/thrivebook.

Until next time, I wish all of America's kids and all of you a bright future.