Today on the Brian Lehrer Show developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett stopped by to talk about the phenomenon of emerging adulthood. Arnett is the real deal: His research has fueled the study of emerging adulthood and he also tirelessly advocates for a sympathetic regard for millennials and for the expansion of institutional Read more…
What’s more, as Hannah’s Story intimates, this “parent problem” will not be solved on the level of the individual, but with broad social change. If you haven’t been following the Times’ coverage of Carroll Academy, start here and here. There is a ton more in the archives, but you will Read more…
Part of my consulting work for NYU’s diversity and inclusion team allows me to learn about different mentoring opportunities across the university’s schools and divisions. Yesterday I had a terrific conversation with Leah Lattimore, Associate Director of Multicultural Programs at NYU’s Wasserman Center for Career Development, about their Mentor Network. Read more…
I am! The theme for this year is “A Decade of Emerging Adulthood: What Have We Learned? Where to Now?” Hope to see you in the fair city of Chicago in October.
Today my advisors and I convened in the “War Room” of AlleyNYC to work through the bones of our pilot program, Multiple Paths to Adulthood. So far the pilot is structured as a three-part program that begins with “Conversations on Adulthood,” a series of sessions that approach the topic of Read more…
I had a very productive meeting with one of my youth advisors today. What made it especially great was that we got to practice skills that were “on the agenda” (how to reach out to strangers over email; how to join groups on LinkedIn), as well as some that were Read more…
This is especially true if your sense of identity has never been thrown into crisis and is largely in line with the outlooks and values that you grew up with. Adolescents necessarily go through a period of “identity crisis” as a result of the changes in their bodies, hormones, and brain development. One of the great lessons of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson is that this crisis period is an optimal time to explore one’s identity: to question their morals, preconceptions, roles, and relationships, and to arrive either at a renewed commitment to those principles, perspectives, etc. or to form new ones. This phenomenon is called “identity achievement.” At the opposite end of the spectrum is “identity foreclosure,” where individuals have a high level of commitment to their self-concept with a very low level of exploration.
An example of a foreclosed individual is the person who joins the family business or enters his father’s profession with nary a consideration of alternative paths. The danger, of course, is a mid-life crisis. Adolescent expert Susan M. Kools has shown that youth in foster care are especially vulnerable to identity foreclosure, since they are pushed into adulthood earlier than their peers.
It sounds counter-intuitive—even irresponsible or heretical—to suggest it, but what if we took a step back from pushing our young people to commit immediately and steadfastly to their goals, and instead encouraged them to look more deeply into themselves, and explore their options more broadly? (more…)
One way of articulating what it is that I’m trying to build into a PYA curriculum is the “seeds of self-actualization,” a term I take from “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow. (Now, I have a terrible blogging habit of burying the lede, so skip down to the jump if you’re already familiar with this.) In brief, Maslow argues that human beings have a progressive hierarchy of needs, beginning with the most basic of physiological drives, moving up to concerns about safety, love/belonging, esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization. Later on, Maslow would sandwich cognitive and aesthetic needs—the pursuits of knowledge and beauty—in between esteem and self-actualization, and top off the pyramid with the search for self-transcendence, or spiritual fulfillment.
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These needs are hierarchical in the sense that the higher needs only typically emerge as each preceding need is adequately satisfied. The higher needs either do not exist or recede into the background for someone who lacks food, safety, love, and esteem. If I am hungry, homeless, and unemployed, I will be preoccupied with securing stable housing and any means of income, long before I might entertain the pursuit of creative expression. And above all, I seek nourishment. Once my most basic needs are met to reasonable degrees, there emerges my thirst for understanding, for beauty, for the meaning of life. (more…)
Part of my fascination with the chicken nugget issue is that it raises the question not only of what we feed our kids, but who decides what they eat in the first place. The story of Stacey Irvine, the seventeen year-old who collapsed after a steady diet of almost nothing but chicken nuggets since the age of two, is an extreme case of what could happen if we let kids set diets entirely for themselves. In her own defense, Stacey’s mother said that her daughter presented problems that her other two children never did with respect to their eating habits. They even happily consume plenty of fruits and vegetables. Stacey, however, shunned all foods to the extent that for her mother it was a relief when she discovered her daughter’s penchant for chicken nuggets.This got me wondering just how persistent adults should be in ensuring that kids get a healthful and varied diet. (more…)
I consider the Rites of Passage workshop not only the centerpiece of my Coming of Age program but my entire Minds on Fire project because, intellectually, it was where I started when I first confronted the issue of how we get young people today to think about becoming adults. My Read more…