FAMS 1500 11 Emerging Adulthood Podcast

Emerging adulthood is a stage of development from ages 18 to 25. It involves various transitions like leaving home, finishing education, finding employment, and starting families. It's a time of physical and mental development, with the brain still growing until around age 25. It's important to take care of one's body and brain during this period to avoid long-lasting damage. Habits formed during early adulthood can impact the rest of a person's life. Emerging adults experience identity exploration, instability, self-focus, and feeling in-between. As a parent, it's important to support and love your child during this time while allowing them to make their own decisions and learn from their mistakes. Hello, my name is Ashley McDonald and welcome to my podcast on emerging adulthood. I'm going to begin by defining what emerging adulthood is considered as so emerging adulthood is defined as the period of development spanning from about ages 18 to 25. It may vary that ages, depending on who you're talking to, and what country you're talking about, or talking in, but that is the general age range that is classified as as is 18 to 25. This age group goes through a lot of different things. They go through new physical developments, they go through social developments, mental developments, all these kinds of different developments. Some typical transitions that occur in this time period are things like leaving home, moving out of your parents' house, finishing your education, like college or a graduate degree, finding employment, which could be just a regular job, a starter job, or even a career. Sometimes it's typical for people to get married in this age range. They may even start a family, start having children of their own. It's also pretty common, at least in the westernized world, for children to begin redefining their relationship with their parents as they're now considered an adult. And they're trying to figure out how that works with them being an adult and their parents being an adult, and them not necessarily being a child that needs to be watched and catered to all the time. They will begin pursuing love lives, dating, possibly trying to find a life partner. Many people often begin to think about a career, what they would like to do to provide for themselves and their families. This is also when they might start developing their own religious beliefs that could be similar to or separate from their parents' religious beliefs and the beliefs they grew up with. And they very typically start having their own independent hopes for the future, goals that they want to have, things they want to do, etc. So in this time period, I also talked about there's some mental and physical development. So in this time, the brain is still developing. The prefrontal cortex is not done cooking. She's still growing, she's still cooking, and it's not fully done until the late 20s. Usually around 25, the prefrontal cortex is done. It's not on a specific timeline. It's not the day you turn 25, your prefrontal cortex is done, but it is around that age range. And the thing is, this is a really important time for your brain development because you never gain more brain cells, right? You can only lose brain cells, which is very unfortunate. But in this time, because a lot of independence is happening, people might be trying alcohol and different kinds of drugs and energy drinks and not eating healthily, not providing their bodies with the sleep and the nutrients it needs. And all of these things can cause harm to both your body and to your brain development, especially the drugs and alcohol. And because your brain is still developing, if you cause significant damage to the growth of your brain cells, or you can't grow your brain cells, but to the growth of your prefrontal cortex, that is something that is going to have a lifelong lasting impact. You can't recover that. So it's very important to make sure you're watching what you're consuming, watching the substances you're using, so that way you don't cause harm that you weren't expecting to have for the rest of your life. And also habits. The habits you develop in your early adulthood will mark the rest of your life, typically. So the kind of exercise you're doing, the kind of diet you have, your sleeping habits. If you have unhealthy sleeping habits, you're staying up late every night, you're not getting the hours of sleep you need, that's going to affect you and your body later down the line. If your body's not getting the nutrients you need, if you're eating just a bunch of junk food and fast food, no vegetables, not a lot of water, you're not going to change those habits on a dime. And it's going to affect you the rest of your life. It's shown that people who don't eat healthily, and they have high soda consumption, sugar consumption, caffeine, it can cause harm to their bodies and they have further health risks later in life that people who don't have those habits don't have. They don't have those health risks, typically. So it's very important to watch your body and watch what you're doing and watch what you're preparing yourself for because you've got one body for the rest of your life, you've got one brain for the rest of your life, and you've got to do what you can to keep both healthy and functional. So, moving on a little bit. Emerging adults have some different societal and social exchanges than adult adults or teenagers. They're different. It's a different world, different life. Some things that typically most early adults experience are things like identity exploration. This is a very big time in life where people are questioning and thinking, who am I? What do I want to be? Who am I going to become? What have I been? Trying to find themselves. This is a very important time for people in Western culture to find themselves, find their dreams, find what they want to do with the rest of their life. It's also a really big time of instability. You might be jumping from job to job, you're in college, you're trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, your career, dating is probably a nightmare. So, there's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of self-focus. You are very focused on yourself, your goals, what you want to do, and very focused with mostly the things you want. You want to go do that. You want to do this with your friends. You want to have these experiences. You want this kind of love life. You want this kind of career. Also, because of the instability, it has a big feeling of in-between. You're not a teenager, but you don't feel like an adult. You still feel like a kid. You still kind of want to do kid things, but you also want to be treated as an adult. So, there's just a lot going on socially and mentally and everything. So, what do you do as a parent? Your child has reached emerging adulthood. They don't need you as much. They're doing things on their own. It's kind of scary because you're like, ah, they're making mistakes that I made and I want to help them, but I can't do that for them. I have to let them learn. So, the best way to support them is to just love them. Let them know you love them. Be a good listening ear. Let them make their decisions. If they ask for advice, you can give it. But you need to just kind of step back, which is going to be so hard to do because you've been with them their whole entire lives, and these are your children. You love them. You want to protect them. You want to care for them. But they have to learn and they have to try and be adults by themselves because if they don't do it now, if they don't experience the trials that come with being an adult right when you're learning in this fresh time period, it might harm them later. They might not learn how to be an adult later when you maybe are no longer able to help them in the way you are now. Maybe you're the one that's needing help. So, it doesn't mean that you can't help them ever, but you do need to kind of let go a little bit and just be there emotionally to support them, offer words of wisdom and words of love, and they will be okay. You figure it out. They'll figure it out. You just have to let them try. But thank you so much for listening to my podcast. It was wonderful and I hope you have a good day.