They take stock of where they have been the success of their past choices, and the possibility of reaching their youthful dreams. Levinson’s findings suggest that for many persons this realization leads to a period of emotional turmoil. Up until this period, most people view themselves as “still young.” After age forty, however, many come to view themselves as the older generation. It is a time when many people must come to terms for the first time with their own mortality. For most people this occurs somewhere between the ages of forty and forty-five. Now, after the relative calm of the closing years of early adulthood, individuals move into another potentially turbulent transitional period-the midlife transition. Faced with this fact, they reexamine their initial choices and either make specific changes or conclude that they have indeed chosen the best course.
If they remain in their present life course, they will soon have too much invested to change. At this time individuals realize that they are nearing the point of no return. Both the dream and the mentor play an important part in our early adult years.Īt about age thirty, Levinson suggests, many people experience what he terms the age thirty transition. Mentors are older and more experienced individuals who help guide young adults. The dream is a vision of future accomplishments, what the person hopes to achieve in the years ahead. Two key components of their life structure at this time are what Levinson terms the dream and the mentor. Once this first transition is complete, individuals enter early adulthood. It is marked by such events as establishing a separate residence and learning to live on one’s own. Taking place between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, this transition involves establishing one’s independence, both financial and emotional. As you can see, the first transition occurs between the pre-adult eras, the time before we are adults, and early adulthood. Levinson divides our adult years into four major eras, each separated from the next by a transition period.
According to Levinson, individuals have different life structures at different times during their adult years and move from one to another through transition periods lasting about five years. Work and family are usually central to the life structure, but it may include other components as well-for example, a person’s racial or ethnic background, or important external events that provide a backdrop for life, such as an economic boom or depression. This term refers to the underlying patterns of a person’s life at a particular time, an evolving cognitive framework reflecting an individual’s views about the nature and meaning of his or her life. Let’s begin with a crucial aspect of Levinson’s theory-a concept he terms the life structure.
However, Levinson’s theory deals in part with aspects of social development, so it makes sense to consider it here. Before concluding this discussion of social development during our adult years, we’ll briefly describe one theory that considers the changes and transitions we experience during our adult lives, the controversial theory proposed by Levinson (1986).
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