Week 3: Leaving the Chrysalis

     I really enjoyed the Arnett article and believe that I've spent the bulk of my twenties in the emerging adulthood stage, exploring love, work, and worldviews. I purposefully focused on community and service throughout my college and post college years. I wanted to get to know others. I wanted to hear about their lives, listen to their stories, and expand my knowledge of self and the world by expanding my understanding of people. I volunteered. I travelled. I moved to Africa.

     Arnett mentioned on page 473, “that parenthood in particular is often sufficient for marking a subjective sense of adult status.” While living in Africa I had the unique, unexpected transition to adulthood through two parental opportunities. I first became the foster mother of a two year old orphan who I fostered for a year and a half and who I have since spent about five years pursuing formal adoption. I also became a house mother for 18 teenage girls living at a boarding school. These responsibilities in many ways led me to abruptly transition from an emerging adult to an adult. The uniqueness of the situation led me back into the emerging adulthood stage when I moved back to the states, thus transitioning from a position of full time motherhood back to a position of exploring work options, housing options, and searching for my place in this new world that I had been away from for so long. Throughout the past five years, I have been in the emerging adulthood stage, but very aware that the adoption could progress at any time, and with it bringing an immediate state of parenthood again, which would lead to a lifestyle very different than the one I have been living.

     I think it is exciting that we, as American men and women, are not required nor expected to transition straight from adolescence to adulthood.  It is exciting to think that we have the freedom to explore our pasts.  It is a gift that our culture gives us the time and opportunity to uncover the things we want to keep or discard from our childhood years and carry over or erase into our adult years. 

     As a counselor, I think it is important to listen to clients and really hear them. Each stage of adulthood has its challenges and 'gifts' (as Armstrong calls them – I love that!) and age has very little to do with which challenges and gifts each individual is working through at any given time. Listening to our clients, understanding them, and allowing them to teach us about who they are is very important to successfully counsel them through life.

Arnett, J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, Vol. 55, No. 5, 469-480.

Corey, G., & Corey, M.S. (2008). I never knew I had a choice: Explorations in personal growth (9^th ed.). Belmont, California: Thompson Brooks/Cole.