The Ideal Age I Would Like to Stay Forever

PSY 253 Ideal Age Paper- Samantha Carter My ideal age that I could stay at forever would be early adulthood, which is twenties to forties. In this stage you are finding your identity, finding a career, and finding love. The major characteristics in this age group are totally re-centering our lives and going from a highly structured environment into an unstructured path. You will go from living with your parents to leaving home and living on your own. You learn the responsibility of becoming an adult in this age group. Also with becoming an adult you find out who you are, and your identity in this age group. One will fall into one of Marcia’s identity statues: identity diffusion, identity foreclosure, moratorium, and identity achievement. With finding out who you are and taking on new challenges in this stage you are consistently moving backward and forwards. Than after you have figured out who you want to be, you look for love and a career. Early adulthood in my opinion is the most important and best time of your life. The first reason I think that early adulthood is the ideal age is because in this age everything is new and exciting. After you graduate high school you get to leave the nest and go off to college and make something of yourself. It is s a time of growth and change and therefore, of confusion, self-doubt and insecurity, but it will make the person you going to be. “The college and post-college years can be an incredibly exciting time as one looks ahead and plans for the future. However, the options can sometimes feel overwhelming” (1). As I said before in early adulthood you are constantly moving backward and forward. As Belsky said, “early adulthood is testing out different possibilities, focusing on self-development, and feeling in between”. This may be why early adult hood to me may be the most exciting because it is one on the hardest times of your life because everything is new, but its so new its exciting. The second reason I think early adulthood is the ideal age is because you figure out who you are in this stage of your life. In the book Belsky said that we are transforming our childhood self into the person were going to be as adults and he called this process the search for identity. You learn responsibility and learn that you have to take on your new role in life as an adult. This is one of the most important things in life, finding out who you are and where you fit in the world, that’s why early adulthood is so important. Also since this period in your life is so important serious conditions, such as violent events, depression and eating disorders, can negatively impact early adults and hurt the finding of your identity (2). On the path to finding identity four different identity statues come up. The first is identity diffusion where teens are transition into adulthood with no goals and life has no appeal. The second is identity foreclosure, where they uncritically adopt a life handed down to them by some authority. The third is moratorium, which is engaged in the exciting, healthy search for adult life. And the fourth is identity achievement, the end point where one finally knows what they want to be as an adult. This process can be so exciting and stressful but when you look back you will realize it was all worth it to get to the person you want to become.
The third and most important reason why I think early adulthood is the best age group is because you find love in this stage. This is Erikson’s second emerging adult task, intimacy or finding committed love. Over the decades it has changed dramatically in recent decades. In the book Belsky spells out a three-stage process leading to marriage called Stimulus-value-role theory. First we select a potential partner who looks appropriate, the stimulus phase. Then the value-comparison phase, we find out whether that person shares our interests and worldviews. Then finally during the role phase we plan our lives together. Homogamy is the main principle in this theory. Finding love is so important and fun because with out it you could spend your whole life alone. Then once you find love to keep it you just have to follow Sternbug’s triangular theory of love. Which is passion, intense, physiological desire for another person, intimacy self-disclosure leading to connection, warmth, trust and commitment staying with that person through thick and thin (3). In conclusion early adulthood from your twenties to forties is the ideal age. Physically, it is a time where we are our healthiest and will reach our peak performance. Cognitively, it is a time to grow up and make life decisions. And emotionally, it is a time to take on roles of independence, lifestyles, and marriage (4). Also Seven out of 10 people aged 40 or older said that 33 was the best year of their lives, with many saying they had more fun and felt more optimistic and that age falls under early adulthood (5). Early adulthood is full of excitement and is the most important stage in your life. You find out who you are and you find love. So in my opinion thirty flirty and thriving are the best years of your life.