Reference no: EM133882477

Question 

Summaris this conclusion and add addition context to the explanation. Conclusion: Distinctive Features of Resilience in Emerging Adulthood What is it that makes it possible for a person to transcend adverse family circumstances in childhood and adolescence, and nevertheless become healthy and hopeful in emerging adulthood? Research on resilience has identified a number of protective factors that are echoed in the lives of the four emerging adults profiled in this chapter. 12 It helps to be intelligent, and a fierce intelligence is evident in Nicole and Bridget, who have succeeded academically in spite of numerous obstacles. It helps to have at least one loving relationship with a parent, as Jeremy did with his mother, or with an adult outside the family, as Bridget had. Religious faith can be a source of strength and hope, as it was for Bridget. Personality characteristics such as persistence, determination, and optimism can be invaluable, and those qualities are evident in all four emerging adults described here. But in addition to these characteristics, which have been known for some time to be related to resilience among children and adolescents, there is something about reaching emerging adulthood that opens up new possibilities for transformation for people who have had more than their share of adversity during their early years. Let us look now at three aspects of resilience that are developmentally distinctive to emerging adulthood: leaving home, reaching a new level of cognitive understanding, and transforming the meaning of a negative past into a positive identity. Perhaps most important, reaching emerging adulthood makes it possible to leave a pathological family situation. This is not an option available to children and adolescents. They do not have the skills and resources to leave a destructive home and go off on their own. Those who try often move from the frying pan into the fire, as the case of Jeremy illustrates. In contrast, for emerging adults leaving home is normal and expected in American society, and most of them are quite capable of living on their own. For emerging adults whose family lives have been damaging them and undermining them for years, simply leaving that environment represents a great liberation, a chance to wipe the slate clean and start anew. Now, instead of being subjected daily to the pain and fear of an unhappy family life, their lives become their own. In addition to the effect of moving out on their own, there is another change that is more subtle but may be equally important in making it possible for emerging adults to transform their lives. It is their growing cognitive ability for self-knowledge and self-understanding. Gene Bockneck calls this their sens de pouvoir, meaning a sense of one's own capabilities, of what can be, experienced as a feeling of inner power. 13 As they move away from the noise and confusion of adolescence, they become more capable of appreciating the ability they have to change what they do not like about their lives. It is this that enables emerging adults to step back and assess their lives, and decide, "This is why it is not working, and this is what I need to do to make it better." The third developmentally distinctive aspect of resilience in emerging adulthood is the ability to incorporate negative past experiences into a healthy new identity. As noted often in this book, identity development is a central part of emerging adulthood. During the emerging adult years, young people reflect on their past experiences, their abilities, and the opportunities available to them in their society, and draw important conclusions about who they are as a person and what their likely future will be. This can be problematic if their past experiences are characterized by pain, unhealthy relationships, and even physical and psychological abuse. But many emerging adults have the ability to perform a cognitive transformation on their past suffering. Instead of a burden to be borne for life, it becomes redeemed as a challenge they have overcome, the essential spice in the stew of their self- It is striking how the emerging adults profiled in this chapter were able to interpret terrible experiences in a positive way. No matter what they suffered, they managed to see their experiences favorably as what "made me the person who I am today," as Bridget put it. They have managed to construct a healthy identity, and they embrace even their worst experiences as necessary to making them into what they have become. Even when emerging adults' lives change for the better, this does not mean that none of the effect of the previous 18 years of their lives will remain with them, and it does not mean that the transformation of their lives once they move out will be easy and immediate. In fact, for all the emerging adults described in this chapter, it has taken them years in emerging adulthood to gain a solid footing after being buffeted around so much in their youth. But once they reach emerging adulthood, it is possible for people with a difficult past to begin to take hold of their lives and make choices that will gradually enable them to build the kind of life they want. Of course, it could be that some people's lives take a turn for the worse in emerging adulthood. Reaching emerging adulthood means making more of your own choices, but some people may make choices that are unwise or unlucky. Others may suffer troubles in emerging adulthood that send a life once seemingly headed toward a bright future suddenly careening off the road anything from an unintended pregnancy to a terrible automobile accident to abuse of alcohol or other substances. No one in my original study seemed to have taken this path, but that could be because such people are too preoccupied with their current problems to be willing to take part in a study like this. I would predict that for emerging adults in general, the correlation between parents' characteristics and their own characteristics declines considerably from what it was in childhood and adolescence, as they make more of their own decisions and become responsible for constructing their own lives, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Nevertheless, there is evidence that in emerging adulthood life is more likely to take a turn for the better than for the worse. National surveys, including the national Clark poll, show that emerging adulthood is a time of rising optimism and well-being for most people, 15 whether they go to college or not, whether they have a stable job or not, whether they were doing well back in high school or not. Emerging adulthood is time of looking forward and imagining what adult life will be like, and what emerging adults imagine is generally bright and promising: a loving, happy marriage, and satisfying, well-paying work. Whatever the future may actually hold, during emerging adulthood hope prevails.