Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has also taught at the University of Missouri. During 2005 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the creator of the theory of emerging adulthood, which he proposed as a new life stage from age 18 to 25. The article originally outlining the theory, published in 2000, has been cited more than 10,000 times, according to Google Scholar. Dr. Arnett is the author of the book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, now in its 2nd edition, published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. He is also the Founding President and Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (www.ssea.org). He has appeared on national television and frequently in print media, including a cover story in the New York Times Sunday magazine in August, 2010. His book (with Elizabeth Fishel) for parents of emerging adults, Getting to 30: A Parents Guide to the Twentysomething Years, was published in 2014. For more information, see www.jeffreyarnett.com.

Rethinking Adulthood: New Theoretical Ideas for Our Time

The final decades of the 20th century entirely transformed the normative course of adulthood worldwide. The birth rate plunged, and life expectancy rose. Median ages of entering marriage and parenthood soared past 30 in many countries. Cohabitation spread, as did divorce and nonmarital parenthood. Enrollment in tertiary education boomed, as work shifted from manufacturing to a global knowledge economy. Yet, despite all these changes accelerating in the 21st century, our theories and conceptions of adult development have largely remained stuck in the middle of the previous century, prior to all these revolutions. Here I will propose some new ideas for understanding adult development in our time, focusing on 1) the ideal of marriage between equal partners, without distinct gender roles; 2) volitional parenting and the new ideal of co-parenting; 3) the quest for identity-based work in the knowledge economy; and 4) the rise of a new life stage during the sixties and seventies, previously a time of withdrawal and debility but in the 21st century (potentially) the life stage of greatest freedom and enjoyment.