The Value of Life Education
Why life education for emerging adults and parents of emerging adult children?
We recognize the birth of a baby with great fanfare. The birth of the young person into adulthood is a different type of beginning, but one that arguably receives much less fanfare and often times is associated with anxiety, stress, and angst. How much of the less-than-exuberant experience of young people becoming adults is due to just not knowing how to do it, not knowing how to get on the pathway to a successful adulthood, not knowing how to support adult children as they become adults?
People prepare for life transitions when they are having a baby, sending a child to school each fall, celebrating another birthday, or becoming a family through marriage or remarriage. Can we do the same preparing young people to become adult? What knowledge do you need for that?
We understand that if we want to do something well, we acknowledge that we need to take time and put effort into learning something. The new way of becoming adult is longer and less predictable is much different from what young people experienced a generation ago, even as recently as the 1980s. We are less aware of the markers of successful transitions to adulthood and parents are less aware of how to help young people achieve those markers. We know that everyone making the transition to adulthood will turn 18, and then 21, and then 25; but how many will become "adult" along the way?
Life education supports the process of becoming adult and can be instrumental in preventing problems along the way.
