By Koby Heramil |Editor-in-Chief|
As children we’ve held onto our inner child, but when is it time to let go of that and become an adult?
Some individuals have different perspectives of what it means to be an adult.
As for me, when I picture an adult, I think of my parents and elementary school teachers. Now granted those individuals are much older than I am, are they what signify an adult? How about picturing someone in today’s time, who do you then picture?
I can’t think of anyone especially a celebrity who is a proper role model for today’s young adults, because just like children they too are still holding onto their inner child.
For example, there’s Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj who are obsessed with nail art and dress in candy-like costumes.
Thirty-four year old Zooey Deschanel plays Jess on “New Girl” a 30-year-old who acts as if she’s four when attempting to say the word “penis.”
Even though I find “New Girl” hilarious, I wouldn’t consider the character Jess a good example for today’s young adults.
However, editor Emma Rosenblum of Bloomberg Businessweek thinks otherwise.
Rosenblum explains that young adults are considering now what’s called “kidadults.”
Rosenblum wrote that, “Adulthood used to be simple. You finished school, got hitched and pregnant, moved out the ‘burbs, and bam! —you were a grown-up. But that path seems quaintly retro, a black-and-white vision of the way things used to be.”
Black-and-white is definitely not how today’s young adults think.
Coauthor Robin Henig of “Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?” states, “If you’re a young woman today, your mother was likely to have been married, had kids, and owned a house at your age, and we still tend to think of those things as the markers of adulthood.”
My mother always reminds me whenever I complain about work about how she had a job at 13 and lived in an apartment paying bills. That traditional pathway of adulthood has vastly changed overtime.
I don’t think about marriage and having children as something that needs to happen right away.
And to that Henig states the average age of first marriages for American women is 27, up from 25 just 10 years ago resulting in delayed motherhood.
Henig continues to explain how the age of first-time homeowners today is 34 and in the 1960s the age was 23.
Communications professor Heather Hundley finds Rosenblum’s view of contemporary adults rather pessimistic and explains people have their own choices, which will ultimately relate to their happiness.
And happiness explains Hundley is “not determined by whether a person begins higher education, starts a career, marries, or gets pregnant at a younger or older age.”
CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) graduate Alysha Joi Griggs disagrees with Roseblum as well saying she feels that today’s youth is more focused on creating a more solid future for themselves.
“And because of this there is less than a rush to date, marry, and have children until we as young adults are equipped with the tools necessary to properly raise and take care of a family,” said Griggs.
“Things have been delayed for the better because youth are taking more time to develop themselves as a whole,” continued Griggs.
I don’t find anything wrong with having an inner child, but setting goals and achieving them is also important.
Holding onto that inner child because you may be afraid of responsibility and commitment is just childish.
Experts say that the, “Slipperiness of modern adulthood can be detrimental if you let the adolescent mind-set linger too long.”
Modern adulthood has changed and change is good, but whether or not the changes are positive or negative we must determine that for ourselves.
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