Emerging Adulthood

Our development has made us who we are. Looking back now, after exploring my own development, I see some of the reasons behind why it is that I am who I am, whether it be physically, cognitively, socially, or emotionally. We are all unique, yes, but we have all gone down or will go down some similar paths in our development. The purpose of my essay is to take you down my own path focusing on key events and experiences that I believe to be influential in my development. I will begin the description of my development jumping straight into middle and late childhood, continue with adolescence, and end with my present developmental stage of early adulthood.

Middle and late childhood can vary, but for the most part it is around seven to eleven years

I am now twenty years old and would fit in the category of emerging adulthood. Emerging adulthood is considered to be the transition from adolescence to adulthood which usually occurs from about 18 to 25 years of age (Santrock, 2018). There are some key features of this developmental stage in life and one I can really relate to is the “feeling in-between.” The best example of this in-between feeling I experience is one day the summer after my freshman year in college a I boy I had never really met before asked me on a date. I grew up in a small town so everyone knew everyone, and my parents were always used to knowing who the people were that went to my school and who were my friends. This boy was not from around my town or old high school, but we got to talking and he wanted to meet me. My parents have always been strict, and so of course I tell them about the boy and how he asked me on a date. I expected to go on this day without any trouble from my parents because to me I was plenty capable of handling myself. I was basically an adult well, so I thought. My parents did not think so, and totally freaked out saying that I did not really know this boy and so on. I told them I am an adult I can make these decisions on my own, and then they started naming all the things that would actually make me an adult, all of which I did not meet. I began feeling frustrated because in my head I was an adult, but then I started having that “feeling in-between” feature. I did not really feel like I was an adolescence to me I was past that stage, but then I did not really feel like an adult either because I did not meet all the “full fledged adult”