Robin Henig What Is It About 20 Things

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In the essay, “What is it about 20- somethings?” Robin Henig argues that the young adults of today rely too heavily on their parents and for much longer than the young adults of her generation. Henig fails to consider how times have changed as shown by some of her examples compare the 1970’s to the early 2000’s. However, she does mention adolescence are given the illusion of responsibility. Giving 16-year-olds a license and a car make them feel like an adult, but they may not realize their parents pay for the car, gas, and insurance. Sending 18-year-olds to live away from a once strict home often means overdoing it at parties in college and losing track of themselves. In a few words “We seem unable to agree when someone is old enough to take …show more content…

This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their ideal­istic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” If all Arnett’s talk about emerging adulthood sounds vaguely familiar . . . well, it should. Forty years ago, an article appeared in The American Scholar that declared “a new stage of life” for the period between adolescence and young adulthood. This was 1970 when the oldest members of the baby boom generation — the parents of today’s 20-somethings — were 24. Young people of the day “can’t seem to ‘settle down,’ ” wrote the Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston. He called the new stage of life “youth.” Arnett readily acknowledges his debt to Keniston; he mentions him in almost everything he has written about emerging adulthood. But he considers the ’60s a unique moment when young people were rebellious and alienated in a way they’ve never been …show more content…

The benefits are pretty obvious- having more time to make up your mind, less social cues to entertain, you don’t have to be anyone other than yourself, you get to live a life you create, your society will be anything other than cookie cutter. All of which sounds ideal but just like any list of pro’s there is a list of con’s, and the con’s of “emerging adulthood” would be that it takes longer to get where you’re going in life if you choose to leave home later. If you rely on your parents for everything like the entitled millennial that you are according to Henig then your parents suffer endlessly. I mean they didn’t sign up to a lifelong commitment of financial and emotional support to another living being or anything…

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