Robin Henig What Is It About 20 Things

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

on adult responsibilities.” “ People can vote at 18, but in some states, they don’t get out of foster care until 21. They can join the military at 18, but they can’t drink until 21. They can drive at 16, but they can’t rent a car until they are 25… The IRS considers full-time students dependent until 24 and can stay on their parent's insurance until age 26- or 30 in some states.
Parents have no access to their child’s college records if the child is over 18, but parents’ income is taken into account when the child applies for financial aid up to age 24.” I happen to agree with Henig's examples and arguments more so than the rest of her article. A real-life example I hadn’t realized until I started college was how you needed to be 21 to drink and only needed to be 18 to get into bars; all of these examples show a lot of focus on the question “When are these young adults actually adults?” but poses no answer. Which is the point I would use to say Henig doesn’t sound concerned she sounds like she is complaining? According to Henig the system is broken, but how does she plan on
But Arnett said, “young adulthood” was too broad a term to apply to a 25-year span that included both him and his college students. The 20s are something different from the 30s and 40s, he remembered thinking. And while he agreed that the struggle for intimacy was one task of this period, he said there were other critical tasks as well.
Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background.

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

before.
In the late ’60s, Keniston wrote that there was “a growing minority of post-adolescents [who] have not settled the questions whose answers once defined adulthood: questions of relationship to the existing society, questions of vocation, questions of social role and lifestyle.” Whereas once, such aimlessness was seen only in the “unusually creative or unusually disturbed,” he wrote, it was becoming more common and more ordinary in the baby boomers of 1970. Among the salient characteristics of “youth,” Keniston wrote, were “pervasive ambivalence toward self and society,” “the feeling of absolute freedom, of living in a world of pure possibilities” and “the enormous value placed on change, transformation and movement” — all characteristics that Arnett now ascribes to “emerging adults.”
To paraphrase what Henig has to say about helping the young adults of today below are some of the things she mentioned throughout the article.
“ But the expectation that young men and women won’t quite be able to make ends meet on their own, and that parents should be the ones to help bridge the gap, places a terrible burden on parents who might be worrying about their own job security, trying to care for their aging parents or grieving as their retirement plans become more and more of a pipe dream. And they often get a leg up on their careers by using parents’ contacts to help land an entry-level job — or by using parents as a financial backup when they want to take an interesting internship that doesn’t pay. Parents are helping pay bills they never counted on paying, and social institutions are missing out on young people contributing to productivity and growth.This dependence on Mom and Dad also means that during the 20s the rift between rich and poor becomes entrenched.”
At first, this article struck me as nothing but a giant list of complaints; but to read that Henig's concerns are the gap between rich and poor and whether or not social institutions are getting paid by the person using the service or their parents! Last time I checked most businesses really care about getting paid, not about who is paying them. As far as children using their parents to gain contacts in the business world and “network” if you will is one of the smartest things I have personally ever done. I live in a small town where my dad is a big fish in a small pond and getting to meet and impress all of the big business tycoons or people who have a lot of jobs to give to young adults like yours truly you bet your life I will be all over that. The difference between this and what Henig should be complaining about is I earn what I get and who introduces me to someone important does just that- introduces us. The rest is up to me to prove myself to them and impress them and get that job offer or contact information all on my own. Henig should be considering when parents get their kids a job they are really awful at and they won’t be fired because the boss owes your parents one.
Name dropping gets you far in certain lines of work and when you want to go into sports marketing like I did at one point having the personal phone numbers of Joe Flacco, quarterback to the Baltimore Ravens; John Harbaugh, head coach of the Baltimore Ravens; and Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armour can really help raise a few eyebrows.
Now that all my opinions are stated I think it’s time to talk about the actual topic “emerging adulthood”.

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…

right?
Something that I have always agreed with is that everyone takes their own time and do things their own way and even those of us who do things similarly can perceive it so much differently; So to say that an entire group of people have to go through all of the same milestones during the same time period